When you use the SAS^® to generate output with the ODS PDF statement or the XML procedure, the length of a double-byte character set (DBCS) variable is 257. If the last character is a DBCS character, then that character is truncated, which causes two incorrect behaviors in SAS output:

• The quotation mark is unpaired in the ODS PDF output and XML output.
• Question marks appear as corrupted data in the SAS log.

If the last character is encoded as a single-byte character, that character is truncated, but the truncation of that character has no effect on other characters in the variable.

There is no solution or workaround for this problem.

Click the Hot Fix tab in this note to access the hot fix for this issue.

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for this issue for Base SAS 9.21_M3 is available at: