Peter
Thanks for the explanation. One further comment — you wrote:
> I don't think the FDA "requests" XPT files
In fact, they do make such a request. Here is the actual language received
this week (and repeatedly in the past):
> Program/script files should be submitted using text files (*.TXT) and the
> data should be submitted using SAS transport files (*.XPT).
Dennis
Dennis Fisher MD
P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
Phone: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
www.PLessThan.com
> On Sep 26, 2015, at 5:52 AM, peter dalgaard <pda...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dennis,
>
> The invalid multibyte issue is almost certainly a symptom of being in a UTF-8
> locale and trying to handle strings that aren't in UTF-8. (UTF uses
> particular 8 bit patterns to say that the following k bytes contain a Unicode
> value outside ASCII, other "8 bit ASCII" encodings, like Latin-1, just use
> the extra 128 character codes for special characters. Treating the latter as
> the former causes errors, the other way around just looks weird.
>
> So perhaps you should try diddling your locale settings and/or look for
> encoding arguments for the functions that you use. Then again, the XPT format
> may not be happy with non-ASCII characters, whatever the encoding, in which
> case you may need to massage the input data sets and change variable names
> and factor labels (iconv() should be your friend).
>
> By the way, I don't think the FDA "requests" XPT files. As far as I recall,
> they say somewhere that they _accept_ them (possibly defending themselves
> against the platform-specific SAS files that once abunded), but I think even
> Excel goes for submissions - the important thing is that they can get at the
> actual data reasonably easy. I can see the attraction of taking the
> well-trodden path, though.
>
> -pd
>
>> On 25 Sep 2015, at 23:23 , Dennis Fisher <fis...@plessthan.com> wrote:
>>
>> R 3.2.0
>> OS X
>>
>> Colleagues,
>>
>> Earlier today, I initiated a series of emails regarding SASxport (which was
>> removed from CRAN). David Winsemius proposed downloading the source code
>> and installing with the following command:
>> install.packages('~/Downloads/SASxport_1.5.0.tar.gz', repos = NULL ,
>> type="source”)Th
>>
>> That works and I am grateful to David for his recommendation. However, the
>> package fails on some of the many objects that I attempted to write with:
>> write.xport
>>
>> The error message was:
>> Error in nchar(var) : invalid multibyte string 3157
>>
>> One work-around would be to edit out multibyte strings. Is there a simple
>> way to find and replace them? Or is there some other clever approach that
>> bypasses the problem?
>>
>> Dennis
>>
>> Dennis Fisher MD
>> P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
>> Phone: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
>> Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
>> www.PLessThan.com
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
> --
> Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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