You can use the IMPORTMATRIXFROMR subroutine to transfer data from an R data frame to a SAS data set. It is easier to read the subroutine name when it is written in mixed case: ImportMatrixFromR.

The arguments to the subroutine are as follows:

If the RExpr argument is a data frame, then the resulting SAS/IML matrix has columns that correspond to variables from the data frame. If the first variable in the data frame is a numeric variable, a numeric matrix is created from all numeric variables in the data frame. If the first variable in the data frame is a character variable, a character matrix is created from all character variables in the data frame.

You can call the subroutine provided that the following statements are true:

The following statements define an R matrix and copy the data from the matrix to a SAS/IML matrix:

proc iml;
submit / R;
m <- matrix( c(1,2,3,4,NA,6), nrow=2, byrow=TRUE) 
endsubmit;

call ImportMatrixFromR(a, "m");
print a;

To demonstrate that the data were successfully transferred, the PRINT statement is used to print the values of the a matrix. The output is shown in Figure 23.143. Note that the R missing value (NA) in the R matrix m was automatically converted to the SAS missing value in the SAS/IML matrix, a.

You can transfer data from a SAS/IML matrix into an R matrix frame by using the EXPORTMATRIXTOR call. See Chapter 11: Calling Functions in the R Language, for details about transferring data between R and SAS software.