Specify 'length' attribute of variable in XPT file

[elimillera]

Hello,

I am writing an XPT file and I would like to specify the length attribute of the character variables. Looking at the write.xport function it looks like this is set as max(c(1,nchar(var, "bytes", keepNA=FALSE))). Would you be open to a PR that adds the option to pass an attribute "SASlength" that overrides the length on character variables? I've tested this out and it can be handled similarly to "SASformat".

mtcars2$mpg <- as.character(mtcars2$mpg)
attr(mtcars2$mpg, "SASlength") <- 20
write.xport(mtcars2, file = "test.xpt")

Thanks,
Eli

[warnes]

Hi Eli, a PR is very welcome!

[elimillera]

Hey @warnes,

Do you have a timeline when SASxport 1.8.0 will be going to CRAN?

Thanks!
Eli

[bms63]

@warnes Hi there, Just curious when the PR @elimillera made to SASxport will be going to CRAN? We have some functionality with a package called xportr that has a dependency on Eli's update. The xportr package might used in another package called admiral in the creation of ADaM datasets. Yay! Anyways, some of this is hard to do with company firewalls and such and not being able to use install_github() from @elimillera PR.

Let us know if you need any help or what we can do. Thanks!