Markdown in other statistics packages than R [closed]

Question

I'm a great fan of R markdown, finding it even easier than weaving LaTeX for quick project documentation (less than 15 pages). However, I also have to support sometimes other Statistics packages (SPSS, Stata + SAS) and was wondering for equivalent solutions for these.

To some extend this might go back to using some kind of original Noweb code + markdown file to be compiled over the command line. I guess calling the other packages from R is another option.

I have had a look at this example by John Muschelli: http://rpubs.com/muschellij2/3888 and it looks as though he knitted Stata code into an R markdown file.

Can someone provide specific examples of how this can be done in Stata, SAS or SPSS?

I do know of SASweave and StatWeave (the latter is apparently broken???), but think that a markdown solution would be far more advantageous in our case.

Answer 1

Stata has its own SMCL for annotation of logs, the M standing for mark-up. The main reason for a different language is that SMCL has to be created and interpreted line by line in situations where no end of document is in sight, namely within interactive sessions. This is created by Stata automatically as annotation when you ask for it and can be stipulated by users or programmers as a way of tuning Stata's display choices.

The possible connection to your question is that SMCL can be translated to HTML, which opens various doors. So, something that is easy in Stata is to do some work, keep a log file in SMCL and then translate the log file to HTML. You would not get anything really nice without further work, but the further work is easy and amounts to doing what you would done any way, but in your favourite text editor or text processor, rather than within Stata.

This is made easier by log2html which Stata users can install using ssc inst log2html. It exploits a feature undocumented in Stata.

Stata's help files can also be translated to HTML in the same way (but consider copyright issues if doing this with official help files; it's fair play with your own help files).