Readying Your Machine to Call R

In order to work with R inside SAS, we need to enable R language statements. To see whether RLANG is enabled on your machine, you can run:

  proc options option=rlang;
  run;

One of two results will be printed to the log. You will either get a NORLANG, meaning you do not have permission to call R from SAS, or you will get RLANG, meaning you do have permission to call R from SAS.

If you get NORLANG you need to change to RLANG. The easiest way is to right-click the SAS icon on your Desktop (put on desktop if not already there), and open Properties. In the Target field, as shown in Figure 1, it provides the location of your SAS configuration file. Generally, it is at:

C:\ProgramFiles\SASHome\SASFoundation\9.4\nls\en\sasv9.cfg.

Figure 1: SAS Properties

Navigate to the SASV9.CFG file and open it. When you are in the configuration file, add -RLANG at the bottom as shown in Figure 2. Save these changes. Make sure that SAS is not open because SAS calls the configuration file each time it starts. You may need administrator permission to modify.

Figure 2: SASV9.CFG file

Running R in SAS:

You need to have an R version compatible with the SAS version. A download to appropriate version (3.2.5) is below. You may need administrator permission to install.

Compatibility with R Releases

Now, in the SAS session we need to point to the R program:

options set=R_HOME='C:\Program Files\R\R-3.2.5';

Use proc iml and submit/R as in below example:

  proc iml;
    call ExportDataSetToR("Sashelp.Class", "dframe" );
    submit / R;
      names(dframe)
      lm(Weight ~ Height + Age + Sex, data=dframe)
    endsubmit;
  run;

  proc iml;
    submit / R;
        library(X);
    endsubmit;
  run;