Part II Re: [R] read.ssd {foreign} (Reading a permanent SAS d ataset into an R data frame)

Thomas Lumley tlumley at u.washington.edu
Sat Dec 21 02:05:03 CET 2002


On Fri, 20 Dec 2002, Saikat Debroy wrote:

> I have no idea what you mean by binary/text SAS XPORT formats. R
> implements the XPORT format as described in
>     http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/technote/ts140.html
> and that definitely is not a text format.
>


Quoth http://www.nber.org/data/sasport.html :
---------------
There are two main kinds of SAS portable format datasets. These are CPORT
and XPORT. Both are popularly referred to as Transport datasets, but they
are quite different, and completely incompatible.

The CPORT datasets have the advantage that they can contain a wide variety
of SAS objects, not just datasets. However, they have no backwards
portability at all. Indeed, I am informed by SAS tech support that even
lateral portability is not to be taken for granted. The earliest version
of SAS for Unix to be able to read CPORT files generated under MVS 6.07 is
6.07.3 - not the more widespread release 6.07.2.

The true portable format is the XPORT format. Supposedly this has full
forwards and backwards compatibility (but see below). Only datasets can be
transferred with XPORT, not catalogs, formats, etc. This is the format you
would use to send data to another site.
----------------------


So CPORT is different, we don't know what the format is, and it may not be
documented anywhere.

	-thomas




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