encoding error?! Out of the blue

[anweinbe]

Good evening.

I have been running the same code for about 6 months without issue. All of a sudden over the past 2 days I keep getting a new error. Nothing has changed in my code at all.... I'm not sure what to do.

Here is the note followed by the error I receive. Any advice?

88 data work.tfns34; set tfn.s34;

NOTE: Data file TFN.S34.DATA is in a format that is native to another host, or

the file encoding does not match the session encoding. Cross Environment

Data Access will be used, which might require additional CPU resources

and might reduce performance.

89

ERROR: Some character data was lost during transcoding in the dataset TFN.S34.

Either the data contains characters that are not representable in the

new encoding or truncation occurred during transcoding.

[mkeintz]

Are you using WRDS (your dataset name is used there)? They have recently converted data to UTF8, and you should have seen notifications. Contact them to confirm.

[anweinbe]

I am using WRDS... I didn't receive any notifications from my university...

Anything you can pass on?

[mkeintz]

Use the wrds website to find the info. If you can't find it, use their link to get help.

[anweinbe · Accepted solution]

found an article on WRDS:

2 options for those with the same issue:

Option 1: Add "inencoding=asciiany" to your custom libname statements

In your SAS code where you specify the library for your saved data, or if you have custom libname statements referencing WRDS data, simply add the option "inencoding=asciiany" to the end of the statements, for example:
libname mylib '~/' inencoding=asciiany;
libname complib '/wrds/comp/sasdata/d_na/' inencoding=asciiany;

Option 2: Change the encoding of your saved dataset to UTF-8 so it matches WRDS data encoding

You can change the encoding of your dataset to UTF-8 format with the following code:

proc datasets nolist library=mylib;
modify mydata / correctencoding=utf8;
quit;