Missing data indicators are not preserved - option for retaining SAS missing data indicators when reading the data into R

[libenson-umich]

I am using the read_sas function to read SAS data into R. The SAS data have different types of missing value indicators (.J=User Missing, .S=Planned Skip, .E=Programming Error, .Z=Not Asked in Current Year). When I read the data into R, all missing data is treated as NA. Is there a way during the read-in process to read in all columns as character strings so that I can still see the different missing value indicators? I don't have access to SAS, so I'm hoping there is a workaround in R that is possible before looking into getting SAS software.

[gorcha]

Hi @libenson-umich, Haven supports SAS labelled missing data using tagged NA values. Please see the Semantic Conversion vignette or the tagged_na() docs for details.