Preventing Transcoding

Some encoding values enable you to create a data set that SAS does not transcode. You might not want to transcode data for input or output processing but rather you might want to create a SAS library that contains data in mixed encodings. For example, both Latin1 and Latin2.
For example, you can avoid transcoding if you use the following values in either the ENCODING= data set option or the INENCODING= or OUTENCODING= options in the LIBNAME statement:
  • ANY specifies that no transcoding is desired, even between EBCDIC and ASCII encodings.
    Note: ANY is a synonym for binary. Because the data is binary, the actual encoding is irrelevant.
  • ASCIIANY specifies that no transcoding is required between any ASCII-based encodings.
  • EBCDICANY specifies that no transcoding is required between any EBCDIC-based encodings.
You can prevent transcoding for a specific column of data while the rest of the character data in the dataset is transcoded by using the TRANSCODE= option. For more information, see TRANSCODE= Column Modifier on PROC SQL.