SAS supports single-byte characters as delimiters. This is true for double-byte character set (DBCS) environments. Examples of these environments include SAS 9 (Japanese) or Unicode server with SAS 9 (English with DBCS and Unicode Support) with the ENCODING system option set to UTF-8).

For example, the character þ (Latin small-letter thorn) is represented in UTF-8 as two bytes (0xC39E) and in SAS 9 (English with DBCS and Unicode Support). This character is not eligible to use in the DELIMITER= (or DLM=) argument on the INFILE statement or as a delimiter during PROC IMPORT.

To work around this issue, replace the multi-byte character with a single-byte character. For example, replace the string "þ" with the single-byte comma character ",".

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