[R] Enhancement request: lookup.xport() in library foreign

[Don MacQueen]

I installed the foreign library yesterday, and have successfully used 
the read.xport() function to get data from SAS. This is very helpful.

SAS "date" and "datetime" variables become numeric variables, which 
is, of course, what they really are in SAS. Naturally, it is 
desirable to convert them to date/time objects in R.

Looking at the documentation for the SAS transport format, nicely 
referenced in ?lookup.xport, if appears that SAS format names are 
present in the transport format file, but not imported into R.

If the format name were available, the conversion in R to POSIXct 
objects would be easier, because the variables that need converting 
could be identified by their format names.

Since I don't know C, I can't take on the task. I would appreciate it 
very much if the author, or someone else if he's not available, could 
modify the code to include the format name.

Thank you
-Don


  -- the reference --
SAS Technical Support document TS-140: ``The Record Layout of a
Data Set in SAS Transport (XPORT) Format'' available as <URL:
http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/technote/ts140.html>.



-- 
--------------------------------------
Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA
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