The METADATA procedure might return an error similar to one of the following:

• ERROR: Missing root element definition.
• ERROR: There is an illegal character in the name.

The error can occur when all of the following are true:

• The SAS^® session encoding is UTF-8.
• The input XML string or file contains a multi-byte character such as the following Turkish character: a lowercase, undotted "i".
• The multi-byte character upcases to a single-byte character. 

The problem occurs because the XML parser mishandles the change in bytes. The error that is returned depends on the location of the character in the input and the impact its location has on further parsing.

The error is most commonly reported for jobs that work with Metadata identities, such as synchronizing identities with LDAP and adding users to metadata from other SAS applications like SAS^® Fraud Management.

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 9.4_M6 is available at: