R devel - Feb 2012 - Reading a Fixed-Width File with SAS import instructions directly into an R data frame

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering if anyone has written (or knows of) an R function that takes
the SAS import code to read in an ASCII / fixed-width data file..  and then
parses out the SAS code to figure out how to structure a (foreign package)
read.fwf command so that fixed-width data file can be read directly into an
R data frame?

I'm envisioning a function that returns an R data frame from ASCII data
set, using two parameters: the location of the ASCII data and the location
of the SAS import code.

I have done some work on the topic (https://gist.github.com/1253937), but
it's got a lot of bugs.  Before I spend a bunch of time cleaning this up, I
wanted to check that I'm not re-inventing the wheel.

Any leads on related (and probably much further along) work would be
appreciated.

Thanks!!

Anthony Damico
Kaiser Family Foundation

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