How do I read in an Emoji in a CSV?

[AndrewJones]

Hello,

I need to import into SAS a CSV file which contains SMS messages.  The SMS message can include emojis.  Whenever I use either PROC IMPORT or an INFILE statement to read in an emoji, the program fails with the message:

ERROR: Invalid string.
FATAL: Unrecoverable I/O error detected in the execution of the DATA step program. Aborted during the EXECUTION phase.

The rest of the file is not imported into SAS.

An example of a CSV file with an emoji is: (taken from the attached file)

"Delivery Status","Question Label","Question DateTime","Answer Label","Answer DateTime","Answer Text"

"Delivered","3","02/07/2019 08:22:39","Invalid Response","04/07/2019 10:31:43","😊"

I would like to either get SAS to ignore the emoji and carry on processing the CSV file, or better still, process the emoji and give a text version of this.  I have found examples where people have done this with emoticons, and so I wondered if anyone had updated this to handle emojis.

I am using EG 7.15 with SAS 9.4.

I hope that this is clear.

Thanks for any help

Andrew

[yabwon]

Hi @AndrewJones ,

I did this on your example:

filename f "C:\Users\&sysuserid.\Downloads\Sample.csv" encoding='utf-8';

data test;
  infile f firstobs=2 DSD;
  input (DeliveryStatus QuestionLabel QuestionDateTime AnswerLabel AnswerDateTime AnswerText) (: $ 20.);
run;

and it worked. Are you working in UTF-8 session? 

All the best

Bart

[AndrewJones]

Hi Bart,

Thanks for your quick reply.  I tried your code below and I still got the error message.  I am working in a WLATIN1 environment.  SAS is installed on a server and so I don't want to change the default encoding since this will affect all other users.  Is there are way to handle this programmatically?

Thanks

Andrew

[yabwon · Accepted solution]

Hi @AndrewJones ,

tray the code below, it looks like you have UTF file with bit order mask (BOM). I've tested it on my Wlatin1 sas session.

Someone smarter than we ( @FreelanceReinh  ) already answered this in the following thread:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Import-issue-Invalid-string-Unrecoverable-I-O-error/t...

%put &=sysencoding.;

filename f "C:\Users\&sysuserid.\Downloads\Sample.csv";

data _null_;
  infile f recfm=N;
  input c $char10.;
  put c $hex20.;
  stop;
run;

filename T "%sysfunc(pathname(work))/temp" recfm=N;
data _null_;
  infile f recfm=N;
  file t recfm=N;
  if _n_=1 then input +3 @@; /* skip first three bytes (adapt if BOM is longer) */
  input c $char1.;
  put c $1.;
run;
filename T "%sysfunc(pathname(work))/temp" recfm=V;

data test;
  infile t firstobs=2 DSD ; /*dlm='0a0d'x;*/
  input (DeliveryStatus QuestionLabel QuestionDateTime AnswerLabel AnswerDateTime AnswerText) (: $ 20.);
run;

All the best

Bart

[AndrewJones]

Hi @yabwon,

Perfect.  This works like a charm.  Thanks for finding the solution.

Cheers

Andrew