Using PROTECTSPECIALCHARS in SAS ODS to allow HTML tags
Posted by Paul at 5:19 pm
How to use PROTECTSPECIALCHARS to allow HTML tags in your data when using HTML ODS in SAS.
When sending output to the HTML destination using PROC REPORT a number of the usual attributes are not available. For example the FLOW attribute on the DEFINE statement. It can therefore be necessary to include HTML tags within the data to be interpreted when the HTML page is viewed in a browser.
The problem is that if for example you enter ‘<BR />’ into your data then SAS will protect the characters and your output will actually be converted into character entities eg. ‘<BR />’. The solution is to use the protectspecialchars attribute within style definitions, which when set to OFF causes SAS to ignore special characters and output exactly as entered.
An example PROC REPORT statement is shown below, note how the protectspecialchars is only being applied to the data in this case and so any special characters in column headers will still be protected.
proc report data=mydata nowindows style (header) = [font_face=helvetica font_size=2] style (column) = [font_face=helvetica font_size=1 protectspecialchars=off];