Read text fixed width text file with unicode

[georgemeng]

When reading in a UTF-8 file with Unicode in it as shown below:

It took me sometime to find out that the unicode is 3 bytes? So in order to read the file correctly, I have to update the file to:

This is OK for small file, but for a big file with a lot of unicode characters, it is just not practical.

My question is when you have unicode characters in the file, is there a way to let SAS process the unicode just as normal ascii characters? I mean without have to manually update the text file with the unicode = 3 bytes in mind?

I have attached the code and text file, please let me know your thoughts.

Thank you!

George

[Patrick]

Add the following to your INFILE statement: encoding='utf-8'

This lets me read your "notworking" text file.

options pagesize=60 linesize=80 pageno=1 nodate;

data attractions;
	infile '~/test/tour13 - Notworking.txt' truncover encoding='utf-8';
	input City $ 1-9 Museums 11 Galleries 13 Other 15 TourGuide $ 17-25 YearsExperience 26;
run;

proc print data=attractions;
	title 'Data Set MYLIB.ATTRACTIONS';
run;

The next part is if your SAS session runs single byte or multi byte. Execute below:

proc options option=encoding;
run;

In my environment the session is single byte and not all UTF-8 encoded characters can get mapped to a single byte. This leads for me to a Warning in the SAS log:

WARNING: A character that could not be transcoded has been replaced in record 1.

And to a garbled character:

Might not be a problem for you if your SAS session is multibyte (i.e. UTF-8).

[georgemeng]

Thank you very much for spending the time over the weekend!

In my environment, I added encoding="utf-8", also checked the session option, the session encoding is also UTF-8, but YearsExperience is still missing for first record.

Your result shows correctly the number 2, is it possible that is because when the three byte unicode character was replace by a single byte "?" ?  

A character that could not be transcoded has been replaced in record 1

Just wonder why it worked in your environment not mine. 

I am really new to SAS, so please bear with me.

My envrionment:

SAS University Editor on Windows 10 through VirtualBox.

Thanks again!

George

[Tom · Accepted solution]

You cannot do it with the INFILE/INPUT statements.  Instead use the KSUBSTR() function to extract the number of CHARACTERS you want from the automatic _INFILE_ variable.  Make sure your lines are not longer than 32K bytes.

[georgemeng]

Thank you very much so I don't spend time on this.

Will explore _INFILE_ to get the file content in.

Have a great weekend!

George