Introduction
Without concrete symbols, a computer is merely a pile of junk.
—Neil Postman
Understanding the basic concepts of character encoding is necessary for creating, manipulating, and rendering any kind of character data. Whenever data is brought into SAS from various external sources (external databases, flat files, etc.), whenever data is transferred between SAS applications running with different languages or across the network via thin clients, and whenever output is written to external files, SAS data sets, printers, or Web pages, an encoding is involved. In each of these cases, something can go wrong.
Though SAS has made it quite ...
