[R] sqldf file specification, non-ASCII

[Peter Jepsen]

Dear R-Listers,

I am a Windows user (R 2.6.2) using the development version of sqldf to
try to read a 3GB file originally stored in .sas7bdat-format. I convert
it to comma-delimited ASCII format with StatTransfer before trying to
import just the rows I need into R. The problem is that I get this
error:

> f <- file("hugedata.csv")
> DF <- sqldf("select * from f where C_OPR like 'KKA2%'",
file.format=list(header=T, row.names=F))
Error in try({ : 
  RS-DBI driver: (RS_sqlite_import: hugedata.csv line 1562740 expected
52 columns of data but found 19)
Error in sqliteExecStatement(con, statement, bind.data) : 
  RS-DBI driver: (error in statement: no such table: f)

Now, I know that my SAS-using colleagues are able to use this file with
SAS, so I was wondering whether StatTransfer'ing it to the SAS XPORT
format which can be read with the 'read.xport' function in the 'foreign'
package would be a better approach. The problem is, I don't know
how/whether I can do that at all with sqldf. I tried various ways like
f <- file(read.xport("hugedata.xport"))
but I consistently got an error message from the sqldf command. I don't
recall the exact error message, unfortunately, but can anybody tell me
whether it is at all possible to read in files in non-ASCII format
without having to put them in R memory?

Thank you for your assistance.
Peter.