[R] Revolution Analytics reading SAS datasets

Chao(Charlie) Huang hchao8 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 11 17:32:06 CET 2011


I am right now using Revolution R Enterprise 4.2. Could somebody show
me how to import/export SAS datasets. Thanks.



On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Abhijit Dasgupta, PhD
<aikidasgupta at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm sure the legal ground is tricky. However, OpenOffice and LibreOffice and
> KWord have been able to open the (proprietary) MS Word doc format for a
> while now, and they are open source (and Libre Office might even be GPL'd),
> so the algorithm is in fact "published" in Jeremy's sense, and has been for
> several years. I figure the reason for keeping the SAS reading functionality
> proprietary is Revolution's (perfectly legitimate) wish to make money by
> separating their product from GNU R and adding features that would make
> people want to buy rather than just download from CRAN.
>
> Within GNU R there are of course sas.get in the Hmisc package (which
> requires SAS). It should also be quite easy to write a wrapper around
> dsread, a command-line closed source product freely downloadable in a
> limited form which will convert sas7bdat files to csv or tsv format (and SQL
> if you pay). This latter path won't require SAS locally.
>
> I'm also sure that SAS has a way to export its datasets into R, since the
> current version of IML Studio will in fact interact with R.
>
>
> On 02/10/2011 03:11 PM, Jeremy Miles wrote:
>>
>> On 10 February 2011 12:01, Matt Shotwell<matt at biostatmatt.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 10:44 -0800, David Smith wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The SAS import/export feature of Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 isn't
>>>> open-source, so we can't release it in open-source Revolution R
>>>> Community, or to CRAN as we do with the ParallelR packages (foreach,
>>>> doMC, etc.).
>>>
>>> Judging by the language of Dr. Nie's comments on the page linked below,
>>> it seems unlikely this feature is the result of a licensing agreement
>>> with SAS. Is that correct?
>>>
>>
>> There was some discussion of this on the SAS email list.  People who
>> seem to know what they were talking about said that they would have
>> had to reverse engineer it to decode the file format.  It's slightly
>> tricky legal ground - the file format can't be copyrighted but
>> publishing the algorigthm might not be allowed.  I guess if they
>> release it as open source, that could be construed as publishing the
>> algorithm. (SPSS and WPS both can open SAS files, and I'd be surprised
>> if SAS licensed to them.  [Esp WPS, who SAS are (or were) suing for
>> all kinds of things in court in London.)
>>
>> Jeremy
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>



More information about the R-help mailing list