added to whatsnew

Author: kshedden

doc/source/whatsnew/v0.18.1.txt

@@ -248,7 +248,7 @@ Deprecations
 Performance Improvements
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
-
+- Improved speed of SAS reader (PR 12656)
 
 - Improved performance of ``DataFrame.to_sql`` when checking case sensitivity for tables. Now only checks if table has been created correctly when table name is not lower case. (:issue:`12876`)
 
@@ -281,6 +281,7 @@ Bug Fixes
 - Bug in ``.drop()`` with a non-unique ``MultiIndex``. (:issue:`12701`)
 - Bug in ``.concat`` of datetime tz-aware and naive DataFrames (:issue:`12467`)
 - Bug in correctly raising a ``ValueError`` in ``.resample(..).fillna(..)`` when passing a non-string (:issue:`12952`)
+- Various encoding and header processing issues in SAS reader (:issue:`12659`, :issue:`12654`, :issue:`12647`, :issue:`12809`, :issue:`12656`)
 
 - Bug in ``Timestamp.__repr__`` that caused ``pprint`` to fail in nested structures (:issue:`12622`)
 - Bug in ``Timedelta.min`` and ``Timedelta.max``, the properties now report the true minimum/maximum ``timedeltas`` as recognized by Pandas. See :ref:`documentation <timedeltas.limitations>`. (:issue:`12727`)