Executing a SAS program in R using system() Command

Question

My company recently converted to SAS and did not buy the SAS SHARE license so I cannot ODBC into the server. I am not a SAS user, but I am writing a program that needs to query data from the server and I want to have my R script call a .sas program to retrieve the data. I think this is possible using

df <- system("sas -SYSIN path/to/sas/script.sas")

but I can't seem to make it work. I have spent all a few hours on the Googles and decided to ask here.

error message:

running command 'sas -SYSIN  C:/Desktop/test.sas' had status 127 

Thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming your sas program generates a sas dataset, you'll need to do two things:

1. Through shellor system, make SAS run the program, but first cd in the directory containing the sas executable in case the directory isn't in your PATH environment variable.

   setwd("c:\\Program Files\\SASHome 9.4\\SASFoundation\\9.4\\")
return.code <- shell("sas.exe -SYSIN c:\\temp\\myprogram.sas")

   Note that what this returns is NOT the data itself, but the code issued by the OS telling you if the task succeeded or not. A code 0 means task has succeeded.

   In the sas program, all I did was to create a copy of sashelp.baseball in the c:\temp directory.

2. Import the generated dataset into R using one of the packages written for that. Haven is the most recent and IMO most reliable one.

   # Install Haven from CRAN:
install.packages("haven")
# Import the dataset:
myData <- read_sas("c:\\temps\\baseball.sas7bdat")

And there you should have it!