wlatin1 encoded dataset in latin1 sas session

[lik66]

Hi,

I am having an issue with a datasets with some coding issues. 

I am seeing "&#xA;", "&#x9;" , "<U+00A0>" and "&deg;" in some free text fields. Currently I am using a macro to exclude or replace these special characters. 

Then checked the encoding for the dataset and the sas session (I'm  using sas studio). For the session, I see "ENCODING=LATIN1 Specifies the default character-set encoding for the SAS session." and for the dataset "ENCODING is wlatin1 Western (Windows)".  I'm wondering if it is because the encoding is not matching so these control characters are not translated properly.

I tried using encoding= Windows-1252 but I don't seem to find a way to set my sas session in wlatin1 in sas studio. Is there a way to set it in wlatin1? Or if there is another route to translate these control characters (eg. line feed) and special characters (eg. degree symbol)?

Thank you!

[Tom]

The SESSION encoding (what you see in the ENCODING system option) has to be set when SAS starts.

So to change that you would need to get your SAS admin to create a application server using a different session encoding and connect to that application server with SAS/STudio instead of the one you are using.

If you have to work with multiple text sources you are probably going to be better off just moving directly to Unicode support. Encoding=UTF-8 instead.  Any single byte encoding is going to be limited to 256 different characters.