Obtain a Data Frame from a SAS Permanent Dataset, via read.xport

Generates a SAS program to convert the ssd contents to SAS transport format and then uses read.xport to obtain a data frame.

read.ssd(libname, sectionnames, 
   tmpXport=tempfile(), tmpProgLoc=tempfile(), sascmd="sas")

Arguments

libname: character string defining the SAS library (usually a directory reference)
sectionnames: character vector giving member names. These are files in the libname directory. They will usually have a .ssd0x or .sas7bdat extension, which should be omitted. Use of ASCII names of at most 8 characters is strongly recommended.
tmpXport: character string: location where temporary xport format archive should reside – defaults to a randomly named file in the session temporary directory, which will be removed.
tmpProgLoc: character string: location where temporary conversion SAS program should reside – defaults to a randomly named file in session temporary directory, which will be removed on successful operation.
sascmd: character string giving full path to SAS executable.

Details

Creates a SAS program and runs it.

Error handling is primitive.

Value

A data frame if all goes well, or NULL with warnings and some enduring side effects (log file for auditing)

Author

For Unix: VJ Carey stvjc@channing.harvard.edu

Note

This requires SAS to be available. If you have a SAS dataset without access to SAS you will need another product to convert it to a format such as .csv, for example ‘Stat/Transfer’ or ‘DBMS/Copy’ or the ‘SAS System Viewer’ (Windows only).

SAS requires section names to be no more than 8 characters. This is worked by the use of symbolic links: these are barely supported on Windows.