Completing the reverse engineering effort is the principle barrier to fully
incorporating the sas7bdat file format. Of course, SAS may change the
format specification at any time, and without our knowledge. The sas7bdat
package is a repository for the results of our (myself, Clint Cummins, and
several others) experiments with the file format, most notably the
'sas7bdat' vignette, which lays out our current understanding of the
structure of sas7bdat files. While others have reverse-engineered the file
format, this is the ONLY publicly available specification. Hence, my
feeling is that the vignette is the package's most important contribution.
A prototype reader is also included; the read.sas7bdat function. Some have
found it useful for routine work. But there are issues, as you have found.
Fortunately, there are ongoing efforts by others to implement more
efficient readers, using the data that we have compiled.
Best,
Matt
P.S. There is a read loop in the read.sas7bdat function, indexed by rows of
the tabular data, that you might use to indicate progress reading the file.
Colleagues
>
> Frank Harrell wrote that "you need to purchase Stat/Transfer", which I did
> many years ago and continue to use.
>
> But I don't understand why the sas7bdat package (or something equivalent)
> cannot reverse engineer the SAS procedures so that R users can read
> sas7bdat files as well as StatTransfer. I have been in contact with the
> maintainer, Matt Shotwell, regarding bugs in the present version (0.4) and
> he wrote:
> it tends to languish just one or two items from the top of my
> TODO... I hope to get back to it soon.
> I have also written to this bulletin board about the foreign package not
> being able to process certain SAS XPT files (which StatTransfer handled
> without any problem).
>
> I am a strong advocate of R and I have arranged work-arounds (using
> StatTransfer) in these cases. However, R users would benefit from the
> ability of R to read any SAS file without intermediate software. I
> would offer to participate in any efforts to accomplish this but I think
> that it is beyond my capabilities.
>
> Dennis
>
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