Date:         Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:08:46 -0700
Reply-To:     Alan Churchill <alan.churchill@SAVIAN.NET>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Alan Churchill <alan.churchill@SAVIAN.NET>
Subject:      Re: dsread - Windows command-line utility for SAS7BDAT files
Comments: To: xlr82sas <xlr82sas@AOL.COM>
In-Reply-To:  <7264219d-0c50-403b-adcc-23290737ed43@s25g2000prd.googlegroups.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

In order to support formats, you need support for the actual format, not
just writing/reading a string. Hence, if hex16. Is needed, a routine for
supporting an input or output of hex16 has to be created.

Alan

Alan Churchill
Savian
www.savian.net
Office:   (719) 687-5954
Cell:      (719) 310-4870


-----Original Message-----
From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
xlr82sas
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2010 1:15 PM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: dsread - Windows command-line utility for SAS7BDAT files

On Feb 25, 10:43 am, xlr82sas <xlr82...@aol.com> wrote:
> On Feb 25, 6:45 am, ChrisBLong <ch...@oview.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
>
> > Readers of this group may be interested in dsread, available
athttp://www.oview.co.uk/dsread
>
> > It's a command-line utility that understands the SAS7BDAT file
> > format.  It lets you examine the structure of datasets conveniently
> > from the command-line, and converts SAS7BDAT data into valid CSV
> > format for import into other software.
>
> > All comments and suggestions gratefully received,
>
> > Chris.
>
> Hi Chris,
>
>    Congratulations for reading SAS datasets. WPS has powerfull
> capabilities. Thanks!!! Competition is great.
>
>    Even though you only create csv's, I see this as a great product
> because you do not need SAS and with pipes users can programtically
> get at SAS data from other languages. Also CSVs are also very amenable
> to EXCEL.
>
>
 ==========================================================================­
===================================================
>
> Just some thoughts:
>
>    Any chance you could create a lossless output format, like SAS
> export datasets, but allow for longer names and
> character values greater than 200 bytes. This would open up SAS
> datasets to other languages. The format would have to be open.
>
>   This could be a really big deal, if instead of a csv, you created R
> dataframes, if called from R. An even bigger deal would be if you
> created a SAS dataset from an R dataframe.
>
>   XML would be another nice output.
>
>   A silient ODBC would also be great.
>
>   I bet you can use pipes whith yow command line interface.

My apologies.

I assumed your site was somehow affiliated with WPS.
It looks like it may not be.

Which makes what you have done all the more remarkable.

I was hoping you honored formats because I wanted to associate hex16
with the numeric columns so I could create a lossless csv, but it did
not work.