Mike, SAS does not read Unicode text. It is not true encoding=utf8 exist HTH Andre I tried upon this contents (a french one saved in utf8) but showed here in windows Nom,Adressé "Bob","cité Bergère" "Ann","impasse Dôme" with this code under sas windows options validvarname=any; filename a "z:\utf8.csv" encoding=utf8; PROC IMPORT OUT= WORK.PAPER3 DATAFILE=a DBMS=CSV REPLACE; GETNAMES=YES; DATAROW=2; RUN; the results are Nom Adress� Bob cit� Berg�re Ann impasse D�me But perhaps you have another problem Bachenot a �crit : > We have a large number of text files built in Unicode that we need to > be read by SAS. SAS does not read Unicode text. > To convert the Unicode > text to ASCII text we did the following: > A Unicode text file adds an additional blank space to each character. > To remove this blank character, you can use the code below. > > The hexidecimal value '00' is a blank character. So remove it using > the SAS statement '00'x. The 'x' tells SAS you are reading > hexidecimal. > > Use RECFM=N to tell SAS that you are reading a stream of data that > will not conform to a typical file structure. SAS will treat the file > as a very long single record. > > data _null_; > infile 'c:\xmlfile.xml' recfm=n; > file 'c:\ascifile.txt' recfm=n; > input c $1.; > if c ne '00'x then put c $1.; > run; > > -- Andr� WIELKI INED (Institut National d'Etudes D�mographiques) Service Informatique 133 Boulevard Davout 75980 Paris Cedex 20 m�l : wielki@ined.fr t�l : 33 (0) 1 56 06 21 54