[Rd] Problem with read.xport() from foreigh package (PR#7389)

[ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 ruskin at iba.com.hk wrote:

> Full_Name: Ruskin Chow
> Version: R 2.0.1
> OS: Windows 2000
> Submission from: (NULL) (203.169.154.66)
>
>
> Data imported from SAS using read.xport() in package foreign are converted to
> <NA> when the SAS data field consists of character strings that are only one
> character long.
>
> This is apparently a previously reported bug and perhaps fixed in some platform
> other than Windows (rw2001).Some discussion of the bug can be found from the
> following website:
>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2002-April/019349.html

There is no Windows-specific version of read.xport(), so that change 
happened everywhere: but that message does not say it was fixed nor which 
change might have fixed it.  I am guessing the change is this one

2002-03-27  Douglas Bates  <bates at stat.wisc.edu>

         * src/SASxport.c (IS_SASNA_CHAR): Silly typo (0x4l, not 0x41)
         caught by Peter.

and that does not sound like the same thing.

> I've downloaded the latest foreign package (foreign_0.8-1.zip) from CRAN but it
> doesn't seem to work.
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

What does that mean?  It `works' on its test suite: none of the changes 
since 0.8 are related to this question.  I don't believe there is an 
example in the test suite with one-char strings, and we need an example to 
reproduce what you are seeing.

So, please read the posting guide and provide us with a reproducible 
example.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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