How to transform names in European native language into English names

[dayuan]

Hi,

I am processing people names, and I find sometimes the names are in native language. For example, names are spelled like "André " or "Martínez". Currently I am manually tranforming such names into English one by one (e.g. "Andre" or "Martinez"), but there are so many names that I feel a little overwhelmed. I would really appreciate it if someone could kindly teach me a quicker way. Thank you very much in advance.

[SASKiwi]

If your problem is caused by different language encodings then this paper may help, in particular the conversion macro included:

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/Multilingual_Computing_with_SAS_94.pdf 

[RW9]

Well, its a tricky one, as names could be anything.  My suggestion would be to create a coded list.  To do this, do a select distinct values of name from your dataset.  Then go through the distinct list and add in the decoded value, e.g.:

CODE         DECODE

André          Andre

...

Then simply use that coded list to replce the original.  I would imagine that you will need to do at least some manual review, I mean you could setup some programmatic conversions, but some will just be really random.

[BrunoMueller]

Have a look at the BASECHAR function, it might just do what you want.

Bruno

[dayuan]

Hi Bruno,

Thank you very much for the useful tip. In order to use the function of BASEDCHAR, should I install "National Language Support (NLS)" as an addition? Since currently the log suggests that "The function BASECHAR is unknown, or cannot be accessed"...

[PGStats]

Yes, you should install NLS.