Reading Compressed Text Files Using SAS Software

Overview

External raw data files continuously needed at work are every day more and greater. Normally, those files come in any of the more popular compressed formats like zip, 7zip, gzip and rar. A common practice is to previously decompress files and next, read them with SAS. Taking advantage of the PIPE device of the FILENAME statement and the aid of some tools free to use, one can directly read compressed data without extracting them first. This paper shows different ways to read compressed data, considering several formats and software tools used to produce archives. Open code software will be used to access compressed data as well as a special dynamic library of the SAS Software.