Importing special characters from Excel

[deleted_user]

I have an Excel spreadsheet that contains a character variable with some entries containing special characters (arrows). When I attempt to import the dataset into SAS either with proc import or as a .csv file through a datastep and infile statement, these special characters are represented as dashes.

Is there a way to get SAS to import these special characters?

[deleted_user]

I think it would be important to know your version of SAS, as in the version 9.2 there are introduced new informats for non-standard data.

[Doc_Duke]

I suspect not. Those 'special characters' are typically a character in a different font. There are just 255 possible characters in the ASCII collating sequence, so most of those TrueType fonts that you see in Excel will collapse into the limited set in ASCII.