Ksharp, Thank you for the reply! Your suggestion regarding SAS NLS documentation, pointed me in the right direction. Since I was not able to find any other forum discussion that specifically addresses this issue, I’ll briefly discuss how I was able to resolve the problem for future reference. Since many SAS character string functions are based on 1-byte roman alphanumeric characters, non-roman alphanumeric characters cannot be processed using these functions. Japanese alphanumeric characters happen to be 2-byte characters and thus must make use of DBCS functions [e.g., ksubstr(), kindex(), klength()]. I ended up using the klength() function in order to identify fields with non-missing values. An entire list of DBCS functions can be found at: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/allprodslang/63337/HTML/default/viewer.htm#syntaxByCategory-function.htm Unfortunately, the number of available DBCS functions seem rather short. Although I was able to clear the first hurdle I had in cleaning my Japanese data set, I’m not sure if I will encounter further difficulty... PQK
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