Ok. I *think* I've got a handle on this. Earlier I said I had tried to reproduce the behavior by intentionally creating a table in latin1 and then trying to recreate it to see if it remained latin1. That wasn't exactly what I did. I actually uploaded a latin1 dataset that had been created on a Windows host, and then attempted to recreate it in a Linux environment. That reliably results in a new table being created with utf-8 encoding. If I create a table in my Linux session with latin1 encoding by using the encoding= data step option, and then replace that table in a separate data step without specifying an encoding option, SAS recognizes the encoding of the pre-existing dataset and uses CEDA to transcode the data from utf-8 to latin1, recreating the table in its original latin1 encoding. Interestingly, the structure of the new dataset can be entirely different from that of the pre-existing dataset. The key seems to be the encoding attribute of pre-existing dataset, and the fact that the pre-existing dataset was created using a data representation that is CEDA compatible. I found the following CEDA documentation that seems to address this phenomen: SAS Help Center: SAS File Processing with CEDA Thanks to everyone for their input. Bob
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