Tips:Handling Transcoding Error

From sasCommunity

With more and more data coming from non-English speaking countries (especially places such as Thailand, China and Vietnam where the words have special encoding values), encoding errors are encountered by users very frequently. As SAS supports many local encodings, this has become a major issue when data has to be sent or accessed on different platforms. To resolve these issues, SAS allows us to declare the encoding schema in the dataset using the ENCODING = data step option.

DATA TEST(ENCODING = WLATIN1);
SET TEST.TEST_CHINA(ENCODING = ANY);
RUN;

Using the ANY keyword in the SET statement, allows us to read in data with various encodings. With the use of WLATIN1, we then transform the data into an encoding system in an English locale (US and Western Europe).