[R] importing sas datasets

[Daniel Nordlund]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Kane [mailto:jrkrideau at yahoo.ca]
> Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 5:11 PM
> To: Daniel Nordlund; a.martino at crismaitalia.it; r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] importing sas datasets
> 
> Hi Anna,
> 
> I'm the sas.get problem man.
> 
> I still have not gotten it to work but I think that is
> because I have some slightly dodgy SAS files.
> Assuming that the sas.get problem is what was
> described in the earlier thread it appears to have
> been fixed.  You might want to do an update to R to
> get the most recent Hmisc.

I have been wrong before, I will be wrong again in the future, but as far as I can tell sas.get is still broken in the Windows version of Hmisc.  The work around that has been described several times does solve the problem.

> 
> An alternative in Hmisc that Frank Harrell pointed out
> is to do a SAS export file and a special version of
> the format file.
> 
> It is described in the Hmisc reference manual See
> sasxport.get . It worked just fine for me on a couple
> of test files. I don't remember but I think you're
> stuck with the 8 character variable names though.
> 

If the sasxport.get function works for your purposes, go for it.  But if you have access to SAS and have SAS datasets that you want to use in R, I would rather import them directly than to go to the extra step of creating a sas xport file and then importing that.  

Dan

Daniel Nordlund
Bothell, WA