Filename ZIP use

[RW9]

Hi,

I had a small question on the filename zip which can no read in directly from ZIP files in 9.4.  The examples I have seen all deal with using this to read in text based files, e.g.

filename fromzip zip 's:\temp\rob\rob.zip' member="test.txt";

data temp;

  infile fromzip;

...

run;

My question is, can this methodology read in SAS datasets from a ZIP file.  Historically we would have the process of running a system unzip statement on the file and I am wondering if we can skip that and just read the datasets directly from the ZIP something like (with test being a sas7bdat file):

filename fromzip zip 's:\temp\rob\rob.zip';

data temp;

  set fromzip.test;

run;

[Kurt_Bremser]

You need fromzip to be a library, not a fileref.

Since one cannot use a fileref (which would point to the .zip) as the path to assign a libname to, this could not work syntactically.

Unless you have external software that "mounts" the zip file like a subdirectory, you can't directly read a SAS dataset from the .zip, so extracting the dataset(s) from the zipfile first and then reading them will still be the only option.

Remember that we also could not use filename x ftp "path" .... to directly access SAS datasets on a remote host.

[RW9]

Thanks.  Yes, Windows under the hood can just read anwrite directly to ZIPs as if they were directories, was kind of hoping to do the same in SAS.  Its simple enough to have a small VB script to copy the files out, may just go with that as the files are not directly being used in SAS at the point of receipt, so doesn't need to be done there.

[Kurt_Bremser]

There is a tool in the linux world that's called avfs that can mount archives as directories.