Convert SAS dataset to xpt in chinese label, but it appears garbled. May I know how to solve?

[Winkle]

Hi,

I changed one variable label as Simplified Chinese and tried to convert .xpt file. However, this label can show text in Simplified Chinese, but it didn't work in xpt file when I open xpt file in SAS Universal. In xpt file, the label appears garbled. The code was shown below. Wondering if this issue could be fixed? Many thanks.

data DM;
 set sdtm.dm;
 label STUDYID ='研究标识符';
run;

libname xptfile xport "\\sass01\tabulations\sdtm\dm.xpt" encoding = "utf-8";
proc copy in=work out=xptfile;
    select dm;
run;

[Tom]

I don't think it is Universal Viewer's fault. There is no place to store ENCODING in an XPORT file.

[FreelanceReinh]

Hi @Winkle,

I was able to replicate the issue. A recent (Oct 2020) external blog post states that SAS Universal Viewer does "not support any other encodings that [sic] ASCII for XPT files[,]" which "was confirmed to [the blogger] by SAS Support" and that "there are currently no viewers at all that support non-ASCII encoding in SAS-XPT files."

So, extracting the dataset to a library with UTF-8 encoding seems to be the only workaround (as suggested in a 2013 post by our Chinese super user Ksharp; I've successfully tested it as well).