Sir Tim Berners-Lee is famous for inventing the World Wide Web and for the construction of URLs — a piece of syntax that every 8-year-old is now familiar with. According to the lore, when Sir Tim invented URLs he did not imagine that Internet surfers of all ages and backgrounds […]
The post SAS functions to encode and decode data for the Web appeared first on The SAS Dummy.
Using SAS with REST APIs is fun and rewarding, but it’s also complicated. When you’re dealing with web services, credentials, data parsing and security, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. It’s useful to have a simple program that verifies that the “basic plumbing” is working before […]
The post How to test PROC HTTP and the JSON library engine appeared first on The SAS Dummy.
I’ve used SAS with a bunch of different REST APIs: GitHub, Brightcove, Google Analytics, Lithium, LinkedIn, and more. For most of these I have to send user/password or “secret” application tokens to the web service so that it knows who I am and what data I can retrieve. I do […]
The post How to secure your REST API credentials in SAS programs appeared first on The SAS Dummy.
Every day before I even wake up, I have little “SAS robots” that do work for me. These are SAS batch jobs that gather data from external services and build data marts, generate reports, and send e-mail. One of those SAS jobs gathers Google Analytics data about our SAS blogs […]
The post Using SAS to access Google Analytics APIs appeared first on The SAS Dummy.
JSON is the new XML. The number of SAS users who need to access JSON data has skyrocketed, thanks mainly to the proliferation of REST-based APIs and web services. Because JSON is structured data in text format, we’ve been able to offer simple parsing techniques that use DATA step and […]
The post Reading data with the SAS JSON libname engine appeared first on The SAS Dummy.
Slack is a tremendously popular app for team collaboration. At its core, it’s an open messaging app that allows team members to communicate with each other in real time. It works well with “startup”-style teamwork, which requires constant communication among people who aren’t always located together. I’ve heard a lot […]
The post How to publish to a Slack channel with SAS appeared first on The SAS Dummy.
Thanks to the proliferation of cloud services and REST-based APIs, SAS users have been making use of PROC HTTP calls (to query these web services) and some creative DATA step or PROC GROOVY code to process the JSON results. Such methods get the job done (JSON is simply text, after […]
The post Using SAS DS2 to parse JSON appeared first on The SAS Dummy.
Last year I shared this popular tip for counting how many times a web link has been shared on Twitter or Facebook. I use this technique daily to report on the social media “popularity” of our blog articles at SAS. I wanted to add LinkedIn into the mix. Like Twitter […]