Objective and Background : You have text data that is UTF encoded and need SAS/R to read and write datasets with that encoding. If you have ever printed or viewed text information, and seen something like Giuffr?Ÿ’e?ƒe?Ÿƒ?ÿ?›ƒ?ªƒ?›?Ÿ’e›ƒ?ª?Ÿƒeee, then you are running into this encoding issue. Computers store text using numbers, with each number assigned to a particular character. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII to find that the character & is stored as 38 when using the ASCII encoding. Unicode is popular internationally because it encodes special characters such as accented letters, and UTF-8 is a widely used version ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 ). In UTF-8 the & character is stored as 26, and you can imagine how the jumbled example above arises from the confusion of what letters are being stored. Solution 1 : Use options to request that individual datasets be read and written in a particular encodin...
Blogging on use of SAS and R software to perform statistical tasks for research data...