10.13 SAS Formats

The top-level function read_sas() can read (but not write) SAS xport (.XPT) and SAS7BDAT (.sas7bdat) format files were added in v0.18.0.

SAS files only contain two value types: ASCII text and floating point values (usually 8 bytes but sometimes truncated). For xport files, there is no automatic type conversion to integers, dates, or categoricals. For SAS7BDAT files, the format codes may allow date variables to be automatically converted to dates. By default the whole file is read and returned as a DataFrame.

Specify a chunksize or use iterator=True to obtain reader objects (XportReader or SAS7BDATReader) for incrementally reading the file. The reader objects also have attributes that contain additional information about the file and its variables.

Read a SAS7BDAT file:

df = pd.read_sas('sas_data.sas7bdat')

Obtain an iterator and read an XPORT file 100,000 lines at a time:

rdr = pd.read_sas('sas_xport.xpt', chunk=100000)
for chunk in rdr:
    do_something(chunk)

The specification for the xport file format is available from the SAS web site.

No official documentation is available for the SAS7BDAT format.