When you run a SAS server in a UNIX environment and you try to import a text file from a Windows environment, a warning similar to the following might be generated:

WARNING: A character that could not be transcoded was encountered.

You might also see this this message when you try to convert data from Unicode. This happens because the character in question does not exist in the receiving encoding. This happens in particular in a Western European environment. The encodings used on Windows (WLATIN1, also known as CP1252) and UNIX (LATIN1 or LATIN9, also known as ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15, respectively) are very similar but not identical. For an overview of their differences, see the Wikipedia article "Western Latin character sets (computing): Comparison table".

The Euro symbol as well as special quotation marks used in Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel might be potential sources of this transcoding error.

To avoid this problem, you can either change the offending character to something that is available in both encodings (if possible) or you can run the server session with the same encoding as the Windows client. For instance, you can run a UNIX server (in a Western European environment) with a WLATIN1 encoding instead of LATIN1 or LATIN9.

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