read.ssd {foreign}

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

Description

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

Usage

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)

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.

Author(s)

For Unix: VJ Carey [e-mail]

See Also

read.xport

Examples

## if there were some files on the web we could get a real
## runnable example
## Not run: 
R> list.files("trialdata")
 [1] "baseline.sas7bdat" "form11.sas7bdat"   "form12.sas7bdat"  
 [4] "form13.sas7bdat"   "form22.sas7bdat"   "form23.sas7bdat"  
 [7] "form3.sas7bdat"    "form4.sas7bdat"    "form48.sas7bdat"  
[10] "form50.sas7bdat"   "form51.sas7bdat"   "form71.sas7bdat"  
[13] "form72.sas7bdat"   "form8.sas7bdat"    "form9.sas7bdat"   
[16] "form90.sas7bdat"   "form91.sas7bdat"  
R> baseline <- read.ssd("trialdata", "baseline")
R> form90 <- read.ssd("trialdata", "form90")

## Or for a Windows example
sashome <- "/Program Files/SAS/SAS 9.1"
read.ssd(file.path(sashome, "core", "sashelp"), "retail",
         sascmd = file.path(sashome, "sas.exe"))

## End(Not run)