Hi, I have a question about one of your examples in the documentation for read.SAScii.

Here's the verbatim example:

NHIS.11.samadult.SAS.read.in.instructions <-
"ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Program_Code/NHIS/2011/SAMADULT.sas"
NHIS.11.samadult.file.location <-
"ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Datasets/NHIS/2011/samadult.zip"

store the NHIS file as an R data frame!

NHIS.11.samadult.df <-
read.SAScii (
NHIS.11.samadult.file.location ,
NHIS.11.samadult.SAS.read.in.instructions ,
zipped = T, )

or store the NHIS SAS import instructions for use in a

read.fwf function call outside of the read.SAScii function

NHIS.11.samadult.sas <- parse.SAScii( NHIS.11.samadult.SAS.read.in.instructions )

save the data frame now for instantaneous loading later

save( NHIS.11.samadult.df , file = "NHIS.11.samadult.data.rda" )

I am trying to do the same with the 2010 version of the survey. However, with both this 2011 file and the 2010 file I get the error Error in toupper(SASinput) : invalid multibyte string 533 with the read.SAScii call. What can you make of it? Thanks!

R 3.0.0 and beyond requires packages to include NAMESPACE files. See discussion here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17196225/error-a-namespace-file-is-required

Using the following code, I get the following error.
Any updates on code for previous versions?
Thanks

{install.packages("SAScii", dependencies = TRUE) }
Warning in install.packages :
  package ‘SAScii’ is not available for this version of R

Hi Anthony.

I was wondering if there would be a way to improve the speed of SAScii by using read_fwf() from package readr or using laf_open_fwf() from package LaF instead of read.fwf. There is an interesting discussion about a these packages in this SO thread.

ps. Thank you for developing SAScii. This is a great package and I'm sure many users in the R community are grateful for it!

Hello, I've got a data file from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis/nhis_2014_data_release.htm, "ASCII data zip icon[ZIP – 1.1 MB]".

Hi, your package has been a lifesaver and significantly streamlined my code. However, I encountered the following error when running the read.SAScii() function: Error in toupper(SASinput) : invalid multibyte string 1234.

Looking through the source code, I narrowed the error down to the toupper() function call on line 10 and/or line 27 of the parse.SAScii() helper function. I figure it must have something to do with the text encoding in the SAS import instructions I was supplied with, which toupper() fails to handle.

I found a fix though, and that was to change toupper() from base R to stri_trans_toupper() from the stringi package. Whatever the issue was with toupper(), stri_trans_toupper() overcame the issue.

I am running:
R version 4.2.0 (2022-04-22) -- "Vigorous Calisthenics"
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)

Code:

# Load package
library(SAScii)

# File/instruction locations
instructions_2008 <- 'ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Program_Code/NHIS/2008/SAMADULT.sas'
file_location_2008 <- 'ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Datasets/NHIS/2008/samadult.zip'

# Import data
data_2008 <- read.SAScii(fn = file_location_2008,
+                        sas_ri = instructions_2008,
+                        zipped = TRUE)

Error in toupper(SASinput) : invalid multibyte string 1234

Hi Damico.

Here is a combination of parse.SAScii and read_fwf{readr} to read PNAD data using a ASCII fixed column width file.

The syntax is really simple and it is quite powerful in terms of speed.

The encoding of a SAS input file may be different from the file system encoding. Thus, trying parse.SAScii() in a system (e.g. Linux and, I guess, Mac OS X) with UTF-8 for file encoding will fail with an input file encoded in e.g. ISO-8859-1. This could be remedied by adding a "encoding" parameter in parse.SAScii() (and maybe in read.SAScii() as well), and passing this parameter to the readLines() call.