Unprintable square characters might appear in the output from some SAS/STAT software procedures when you use a UTF8 SAS session with the VALIDVARNAME=ANY system option. The procedures include the following:
This problem can occur if a variable name is in a multi-byte character set and there is not enough space in a column to print the full value. An example is shown below:
For example, the problem would occur with the following code:
To circumvent the problem, include the NAMELEN= option in the PROC statement. In this case, setting the NAMELEN= option to 30 resolves the issue.