read special characters from excel

[COMPAREMISSING]

Dears,

I have a text variable in excel which contains the symbol "≥".

how can i read it in SAS?

thans and kind regrads, 

Barbara

[Kurt_Bremser]

Make sure your SAS session uses UTF-8 encoding.

[PhilC]

It's unclear to me if this was successful.  But -- if you haven't read this thread.  It certainly is related to this.

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Import-xls-file-using-encoding-UTF-8/td-p/598659