ERROR: Invalid characters were present in the data.

[marysmith]

Dear community,

as I am not having access to SAS 9.4 anymore I am trying my best with SAS Studio. Before I have worked on a Windows PC and I am trying to make it work on my macbook now.

After quite some time, I just managed to SAS read in my excel sheet - yay!

But now I am getting this error message for an easy command as proc print and I really have no clue what could be the Problem?

proc print
data=pms.datensatz_PMS;
run;

 ERROR: Invalid characters were present in the data.

Thank you!

[Reeza · Accepted solution]

Your data has some special characters that can't be printed for some reason. If you can save that xls files as XLSX and re-import I suspect it may solve some of that problem. Otherwise, check the file for special characters such as accented letters, super scripts or images/fonts.

[ehbales]

"as I am not having access to SAS 9.4 anymore I am trying my best with SAS Studio."

Are you using SAS Viya instead of 9.4? If so, the default SAS encoding for SAS Viya is UTF-8. The ASCII characters (7-bit) are represented as one byte in UTF-8. All other characters must be represented as more than one byte. 

Some software applications will substitute typographical characters for the character you type at the keyboard. For example, the apostrophe may be replaced by a left or right quote, depending on the context. The minus sign may be converted to a longer dash. Other substitutions are common. The substituted characters are not ASCII characters. 

Accented characters and special characters, such as the plus-minus (±), are available as a single-byte when the SAS session encoding is a single-byte native encoding, such as WLATIN1. However, any characters that are not English letters, numbers, and ASCII punctuation also must be represented as more than one byte.

Do you have a FILENAME statement that references your Excel sheet? If so, what does that look like?

[marysmith]

Thank you!

[bryanjonathan_3]

You can use compress() function for column values: https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lefunctionsref&docsetTarget=n0fcshr0ir3h73n1b845c4aq58hz.htm...