Moving and Accessing SAS Files in International Environments

SAS provides National Language Support (NLS) for SAS applications and data that are created in supported operating environments. Customers who use the English language can use SAS applications and data that are created in the United States. However, without NLS, customers in other geographic regions of the world such as Asia and Europe would not be able to run SAS applications and read and write data that was created in the United States. NLS features enable customers to process data successfully in their native languages and environments, regardless of the language that the application and data were created in.

As an example, a source SAS session runs a SAS application and creates a data set, which is written in the English language, on a SAS 8 PC. A target SAS session runs a different SAS application, which is written in the German language, on a SAS 6 mainframe that needs to read from and write to the SAS data set that was created in the English language.

Before the data can be moved or accessed using the preferred strategy, (for example, CEDA or PROC CPORT and PROC CIMPORT), locale or encoding must be specified at the source session and target session to enable the source data to be translated to the format of the target session. If encodings are not accounted for in an international environment, source and target sessions cannot read and write the data. Strategies for specifying locale or encoding vary according to the version of SAS that is running on the source and target machines.

If you are moving or accessing SAS files in an international environment, see SAS National Language Support (NLS): User's Guide .