The TRANTAB Procedure

Overview

The TRANTAB procedure creates, edits, and displays customized translation tables. In addition, you can use PROC TRANTAB to view and modify translation tables that are supplied by SAS Institute. These Institute-supplied tables are stored in the SASHELP.HOST catalog. Any translation table that you create or customize is stored in your SASUSER.PROFILE catalog. Translation tables have an entry type of TRANTAB.

Translation tables are operating environment-specific SAS catalog entries that are used to translate the values of one (coded) character set to another. A translation table has two halves: table one provides a translation, such as ASCII to EBCDIC; table two provides the inverse (or reverse) translation, such as EBCDIC to ASCII. Each half of a translation table is an array of 256 two-digit positions, each of which contains a one-byte unsigned number that corresponds to a coded character.

The SAS System uses translation tables for the following purposes:

determining the collating sequence in the SORT procedure
performing transport-format translations when you transfer files with the CPORT and CIMPORT procedures
performing translations between operating environments when you access remote data in SAS/CONNECT or SAS/SHARE software
facilitating data communications between the operating environment and a graphics device when you run SAS/GRAPH software in an IBM environment
accommodating national language character sets other than U.S. English.

PROC TRANTAB produces no output. It can display translation tables and notes in the SAS log.

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