I am trying to use a database for biosciences research. The database comes in a few files each ~ 3 gigabyte .ASC files. The corporation that uses it provides an SAS load file that can be found here. My question is is there a way to use this ASCII file and SAS Load file to create a txt, or csv with the appropriate headers and data values. My ultimate goal is to do my data analysis in python and I wasn't sure how to proceed. Any information would be greatly appreciated.
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It seems your database file is already in a fixed width format; so you should be able to load it in Python easily. The load file you provided tells you the description and size of each of the data fields (there are some that are repeating). The data type is only tangentially relevant as you will be reading everything as characters and can later convert it to the appropriate type in Python (depending on what kind of analysis you want done). I recommend having a look at the [pandas library](http://pandas.pydata.org) which is optimized for such data operations. – Burhan Khalid Feb 08 '17 at 04:56