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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T18:56:40+00:00

I have been taking a few graduate classes with a professor I like alot

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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

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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;
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