An encoding maps each
character in a character set to a unique numeric representation, resulting
in a table of all code points. A single character can have different
numeric representations in different encodings. For example, the ASCII
encoding for the dollar symbol $ is 24 hexadecimal. The Danish EBCDIC
encoding for the dollar symbol $ is 67 hexadecimal. In order for a
version of SAS that normally uses ASCII to properly interpret a data
set that is encoded in Danish EBCDIC, the data must be transcoded.
Transcoding
is the process of moving data from one encoding to another. When transcoding
the ASCII dollar sign to the Danish EBCDIC dollar sign, the hexadecimal
representation for the character is converted from the value 24 to
a 67.
If you want to know
the encoding of a particular SAS data set, for SAS 9 and above follow
these steps:
-
Locate the data set
with SAS Explorer.
-
Right-click the data
set.
-
Select Properties from
the menu.
-
-
The encoding of the
data set is listed, along with other information.
Some situations where
data might commonly be transcoded are:
-
when you share data between two
different SAS sessions that are running in different locales or in
different operating environments,
-
when you perform text-string operations,
such as converting to uppercase or lowercase,
-
when you display or print characters
from another language,
-
when you copy and paste data between
SAS sessions running in different locales.