10 SpinSAS

spinsas is an alternative way of processing dynamic Markdown from a SAS command file. In this form, documents are written within the comments of a SAS file. This enables you to run the same file within SAS (to simply execute the commands) and through knitr (to produce Markdown and HTML files).

This is particularly useful if you already have a number of *.sas files to which you'd like to add a little text to produce a document.

10.1 Special Markup

Within your SAS command file (*.sas), you use the following symbols to denote plain Markdown text, SAS code chunks, R code chunks, and text to be dropped from the document.

Notice that SAS will treat all of these as comments.

“**”, a double asterisk, signals the beginning of document text.
End with a semi-colon, “;” at the end of a line.
“*+ “, an asterisk-plus, signals the beginning of a code chunk, and specifies the code chunk options. End with a semi-colon.
“*R “, an asterisk-R, signals the enclosed code is in R. End with a semi-colon.
“/**”, comments to “spin” begin with slash-double-asterisk. These do not show up in your document. End with “/” at the end of a line.

10.2 Semi-colons

No semi-colons at the ends of lines in your document text.
Your chunk of SAS code must end with a semi-colon (not a block comment).

10.3 Example

In order to run SAS code, first we load the SASmarkdown library so it can automatically set up some necessary options in R.

*+ setup, message=FALSE ;

*R 
library(SASmarkdown)
;

Text is then included as a special comment.

** The report begins here.;

Finally, the executable SAS code is given a line of chunk instructions.

*+  example1, engine='sas', comment=NA;

proc means data=sashelp.class /*(keep = age)*/;
run;

/* lines here are
ignored by SAS.  If at the end of
your SAS code chunk they must be followed by a semi-colon.
*/
;

You can use the usual Markdown within the text sections.

The entire document might be:

*+ setup, message=FALSE ;

*R 
library(SASmarkdown)
;

** The report begins here.;

*+  example1, engine='sas', comment=NA;

proc means data=sashelp.class /*(keep = age)*/;
run;

10.4 Processing

Set up an example file to use:

indoc <- "
*+ setup, message=FALSE ;

*R 
library(SASmarkdown)
;

** The report begins here.;

*+  example1, engine='sas', comment=NA;

proc means data=sashelp.class /*(keep = age)*/;
run;
"
writeLines(indoc, "indoc.sas")

To process this document then, simply use

library(SASmarkdown)
spinsas("indoc.sas")

Which gives a document, "indoc.html" that looks like the following:

library(SASmarkdown)

The report begins here.


proc means data=sashelp.class /*(keep = age)*/;
run;

                            The MEANS Procedure

 Variable    N           Mean        Std Dev        Minimum        Maximum
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Age        19     13.3157895      1.4926722     11.0000000     16.0000000
 Height     19     62.3368421      5.1270752     51.3000000     72.0000000
 Weight     19    100.0263158     22.7739335     50.5000000    150.0000000
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Written using

SASmarkdown version 0.8.0.
knitr version 1.40.
R version 4.2.2 (2022-10-31 ucrt).