How can I read a SAS dataset?

Question

I have a lot of files in SAS format, and I\'d like to be able to read them in programs outside of SAS. I don\'t have anything except the base SAS system installed. I could man

Answer 1

You could make a SAS-to-CSV conversion program.

Save the following in sas_to_csv.sas:

proc export data=&sysparm
    outfile=stdout dbms=csv;
run;

Then, assuming you want to access libname.dataset, call this program as follows:

sas sas_to_csv -noterminal -sysparm "libname.dataset"

The SAS data is converted to CSV that can be piped into Python. In Python, it would be easy enough to generate the "libname.dataset" parameters programmatically.