title: Read SAS sas7bdat data into R
body: <p>What options does R have for reading files in the native SAS format, <code>sas7bdat</code>, into R?</p>
  <p>The <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubschuniv.asp" rel="noreferrer">NCES Common Core</a>, for example, contains an extensive repository of data files saved in this format. For concreteness, let's focus on trying to read in <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/data/zip/psu97ai.zip" rel="noreferrer">this</a> file from LEA Universe in 1997-98, which contains education-agency-level demographics for entities in all states beginning A through I.</p>
  <p>Here's a preview from SAS of the data:</p>
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/W4Dcs.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/W4Dcs.png" alt="A screenshot from SAS showing 15 rows of data and the first 5 columns" /></a></p>
  <p>What's the simplest way to bring this data in to my R environment? I don't have any version of SAS available and am not willing to pay, so simply converting it to .csv would be a hassle.</p>