Importing public data with SAS instructions into R by David Smith.
From the post:
Many public agencies release data in a fixed-format ASCII (FWF) format. But with the data all packed together without separators, you need a “data dictionary” defining the column widths (and metadata about the variables) to make sense of them. Unfortunately, many agencies make such information available only as a SAS script, with the column information embedded in a PROC IMPORT statement.
David reports on the SAScii package from Anthony Damico.
You still have to parse the files but it gets you one step closer to having useful information.