Starting a SAS session with UTF-8 encoding on a user level

Question

At my workplace we are using SAS v9.3 on a Unix server. I need to change the encoding of the SAS session to UTF-8 on a user level. In order to do that I created a sasv9.cfg file in my /home directory, and tried ENCODING latin1 as a test (default is latin9). This works fine. However if I put ENCODING UTF-8 it doesn't work: after I start the SAS EG 5.1 client there is no connection to the server. Details are as follow:

Exception type:  SAS.EG.SDS.SDSException
SAS Message:     [Error] The launch of the server process failed because of a SAS kernel initialization failure.

Raw Message:     <?xml version="1.0" ?><Exceptions><Exception><SASMessage severity="Error">The launch of the server process failed because of a SAS kernel initialization failure.</SASMessage></Exception></Exceptions>
Source:          SAS.EG.SDS.Model
Target Site:     SASWorkspace

Stack Trace:
   à SAS.EG.SDS.Model.Server.SASWorkspace()
   à SAS.EG.SDS.Views.View.DoPopulate(DisplayOperation& op)

From what I read somehere upon connection it spawns a session through the symbolic link /[sashome]/SASFoundation/9.3/sas which points to bin/sas_fr

but I'd need to go through /[sashome]/SASFoundation/9.3/sas_dbcs instead (for my user account only). How can I achieve that?

Unless there is another solution!

Thank you for your help.

Are you trying use Enterprise Guide? Or just run SAS? Also why are you using such an old version of SAS? — Tom
I use the SAS EG 5.1 client to connect to a server that runs SAS 9.3. We are soon migrating to SAS EG 8.1 with a SAS 9.4 server but it's pretty much the same issue. — FrankO
Why not just have them create two application servers. One using UTF-8. Then each EG user can decide which to connect to. — Tom
I had already submitted that idea to the technical team, they are considering it. But for now I'm trying to make it work on a user level for urgent testing. In order to do that my client connection needs to somehow invoke /[sashome]/SASFoundation/9.3/sas_dbcs instead of /[sashome]/SASFoundation/9.3/sas. — FrankO
The other possibility is to try running your SAS code on the server directly without using EG. That will be a lot easier since you and trying setting some options on the command line. — Tom

FrankO FrankO · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-23T13:03:52

Got an answer from SAS technical support:

"The kernel error you are seeing is being caused by launching SBCS (single-byte character set) SAS and attempting to specify a double-byte encoding such as UTF-8."

After running this command: cd [SAS CONFIG PATH]/Lev1/AppSAS-prod/WorkspaceServer echo "endsas;" | bash -x ./WorkspaceServer.sh -verbose -nodms -oplist -stdio > /tmp/launchSAS.txt 2>&1

and examining the launchSAS file they concluded the problem was in the handling of the PATH option in SAS. The effective value in my session was: PATH !SASROOT/sasexe /[SUDAAN HOME]/SUDAAN/v11.0.3/Linux64/SASCallable /usr/local/lib !SASROOT/dbcs/sasexe !SASROOT/sasexe

!SASROOT/sasexe appears before !SASROOT/dbcs/sasexe. This is why I was launching a SBCS SAS session.

There are settings for the PATH option in three of our configuration files, but the one that needed fix was /[SASHOME]/SASFoundation/x.x/sasv9_local.cfg

!SASROOT/sasexe was removed from the PATH.

Starting a SAS session with UTF-8 encoding on a user level

1 Answers