That code worked! But I can't move forward from here -- I ran a proc contents and received the errors:   ERROR: Invalid characters were present in the data. ERROR: An error occurred while processing text data.   I just need to proc sort this dataset by ID and merge it with a couple of other datasets (those ones uploaded correctly).  ... View more

wlatin1 was used for the original file. I do not see an option to change encoding to wlatin1 unfortunately. I tried DATA DATASET1 ; SET geisel.cohort1 (encoding=wlatin1); RUN; and got the same error. ... View more

It was originally UTF-8, but I tried windows-1252 and a couple of others as well. ... View more

Yes, the characters that were not identified are not really important to the research goal - how do I proceed past this?   I tried changing the default text encoding to windows-1252 as indicated in the link you provided and it still is showing the same error.  ... View more

Hi Tom, I've done that but am getting this error:   ERROR: Some character data was lost during transcoding in the dataset GEISEL.COHORT1. Either the data contains characters that are not representable in the new encoding or truncation occurred during transcoding.   any advice? ... View more

Ahhhhhhhhhh okay the problem was that the file was in all caps I think! So I think I have the code right now:   The path to the file: /home/u59331558/LaF/STI/cohort1.sas7bdat   My code: DATA DATASET1; SET "/home/u59331558/LaF/STI/cohort1.sas7bdat"; RUN;   Now I am getting this message:   NOTE: Data file WC000001.COHORT1.DATA is in a format that is native to another host, or the file encoding does not match the session encoding. Cross Environment Data Access will be used, which might require additional CPU resources and might reduce performance. 72 RUN;   ERROR: Some character data was lost during transcoding in the dataset WC000001.COHORT1. Either the data contains characters that are not representable in the new encoding or truncation occurred during transcoding.   NOTE: The DATA step has been abnormally terminated. NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors. NOTE: There were 270 observations read from the data set /home/u59331558/LaF/STI/cohort1.sas7bdat.   WARNING: The data set WORK.DATASET1 may be incomplete. When this step was stopped there were 270 observations and 2220 variables.       I know that I should have 612 observations and 2220 variables - so at least that part is right.     ... View more