SAS XPORT Transport Format

[Douglas Bates]

A colleague pointed out that the United States Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) has adopted a transport format defined by SAS
Institute as a standard for electronic submissions of data.  As a
result, this format has been openly documented.

The URL for the documentation on the format is
       http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/technote/ts140.html

Information on the FDA standards for Electronic submissions is given at
       http://www.sas.com/software/industry/pht/fda/index.html

Has anyone written code to import data stored in this format into R?

Saikat DebRoy and I started reverse-engineering the format before our
colleague pointed out that it was openly documented.  It was a rather
interesting exercise because floating point format is _not_ an IEEE
format, it is an old format with a base 16 exponent, no hidden bit,
etc.  It takes me back to the days of punched cards, IBM mainframes,
JCL, ...

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