Import

The SAS Transport File Format (XPORT) is an open file format maintained by SAS for exchanging datasets. Its use is mandated by the FDA for data set submission for new drug or device applications and the CDC uses this format to distribute public data. For details regrading this format, see this Library of Congress page. This post will explore how to read several of these files into a SAS session with the URL filename statement using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES, as an example. ...

Zillow is a well-known website widely used by those searching for a home or curious to find out the value of their current home. What you may not know is that Zillow has a dedicated research page. To make their website work optimally, they churn through tons of data on the American housing market. They share insights they gleaned via zillow.com/research. If you visit their research website you’ll notice they have a data page where you can download some really cool data sets for your own research. They even have an API with which you can load data directly, but you’ll have to register for access. In this post, we’ll look at how to load the CSV files that are available for direct download into SAS for analysis. ...

I find myself needing to import CSV files with a relatively large number of columns. In many cases, proc import works surprisingly well in giving me what I want. But sometimes, I need to do some work while reading in the file and it would be nice to just use a data step to do so, but I don’t want to type it in by hand. That’s when a combination of proc import and some regex substitution can come in handy. ...