Be careful, in order to natively process SAS tables encoded in UTF-8 (or UTF-16), you need to use another sas launcher, which means another SAS engine & another character functions (KSCAN , KSUBSTR etc.). http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/92unicodesrvr.pdf Unfortunately, SAS Foundation is installed in dual mode ISO (default) and UTF (called DBCS). Starting with DBCS has strong implications further. for instance, on Linux, the command line to lauch SAS DBCS with UTF-8 is the following :
$SASROOT/SASFoundation/9.2/bin/sas_u8 -encoding utf-8
Back to your problem, using a Unicode SAS session might be unnecessary. You can try, in your default SAS (ISO) session assigning your Filename with the option ENCODING=utf8. SAS can transcode UTF to ISO (e g WLATIN1) at the import step and let you then code as usual. The target tables are then stored in ISO (WLATIN1), of course.
FILENAME myfile 'my pathname' ENCODING=utf8;
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