SAS and Web Data

Question

I have been taking a few graduate classes with a professor I like alot and she raves about SAS all of the time. I "grew up" learning stats using SPSS, and with their recent decisions to integrate their stats engine with R and Python, I find it difficult to muster up the desire to learn anything else. I am not that strong in Python, but I can get by with most tasks that I want to accomplish.

Admittedly, I do see the upside to SAS, but I have learned to do some pretty cool things combining SPSS and Python, like grabbing data from the web and analyzing it real-time. Plus, I really like that I can use the GUI to generate the base for my code before I add my final modifications. In SAS, it looks like I would have to program everything by hand (ignoring Enterprise Guide).

My question is this. Can you grab data from the web and parse it into SAS datasets? This is a deal-breaker for me. What about interfacing with API's like Google Analytics, Twitter, etc? Are there external IDE's that you can use to write and execute SAS programs?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Brock

Answer 1

yes. sas 9.2 can interact with soap and restful apis. i haven't had much success with twitter. i have had some success with google spreadsheets (in sas 9.1.3) and i've seen code to pull google analytics (in sas 9.2).

as with python and r, you can write the code in any text editor, but you'll need to have sas to actually execute it. lately, i've been bouncing between eclipse, pspad, and sas's enhanced editor for writing code, but i always have to submit in sas.

Answer 2

Incidentally, SAS is now offering integration with R. http://support.sas.com/rnd/app/studio/Rinterface2.html

There are all sorts of ways to get data off the web. One example is to use the url access methods on filename statements to pull in xml data off the web. For example:

filename cmap "yldmap.map"; /* an xml map I created to parse the data */
filename curyld
      url "http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/domestic-finance/debt-management/interest-rate/yield.xml";

libname curyld xml xmlmap=cmap;