Due largely to the work of Clint Cummins, the sas7bdat file format has become a bit less shrouded. In particular, we now know the following:
- how to detect files with compressed data (and fail graciously)
- more details about the platform that generated the file (e.g., endianess, OS details)
- how to read files that were generated on a 32-bit 'Linux' platform
These are significant improvements. The details are documented in the 'sas7bdat' vignette, and online at the sas7bdat Github repository. The revised R package will be available on CRAN shortly, but is still EXPERIMENTAL.
I actually figured out how to parse compressed files. Please shoot me an e-mail so I can correspond with you to update the readers to be able to determine and correctly parse compressed files. I tried to e-mail you, but I am not sure if it made it to your inbox.