UTF-16 encoding is not supported as a session encoding. That is, you cannot set UTF-16 as a SAS^® system option to affect the entire SAS session. However, UTF-16 can be encoded into a SAS data set or encoded into a database file from a SAS data set. To do so, set the session encoding to UTF-8 and then specify ENCODING=UTF-16 in the INFILE statement or ENCODING= in the FILENAME statement. See the following example:

filename test "C:\example.txt" encoding="UTF-16";
proc import datafile=test out=work.dataset dbms=dlm replace;
   delimiter='090a'x;
   getnames=no; 
   datarow=1;
run;

For more information about UTF-8 and SAS session encoding, see ENCODING= Option.

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