I’m pleased to announced that the new haven package is now available on CRAN. Haven makes it easy to read data from SAS, SPSS and Stata. Haven has the same goal as the foreign package, but it:

• Can read binary SAS7BDAT files.
• Can read Stata13 files.
• Always returns a data frame.

(Haven also has experimental support for writing SPSS and Stata data. This still has some rough edges but please try it out and report any problems that you find.)

Haven is a binding to the excellent ReadStat C library by Evan Miller. Haven wouldn’t be possible without his hard work – thanks Evan! I’d also like to thank Matt Shotwell who spend a lot of time reverse engineering the SAS binary data format, and Dennis Fisher who tested the SAS code with thousands of SAS files.