Enhanced Importing of SPSS Files

spss.get invokes the read.spss function in the foreign package to read an SPSS file, with a default output format of "data.frame". The label function is used to attach labels to individual variables instead of to the data frame as done by read.spss. By default, integer-valued variables are converted to a storage mode of integer unless force.single=FALSE. Date variables are converted to R Date variables. By default, underscores in names are converted to periods.

Usage

spss.get(file, lowernames=FALSE, datevars = NULL,
         use.value.labels = TRUE, to.data.frame = TRUE,
         max.value.labels = Inf, force.single=TRUE,
         allow=NULL, charfactor=FALSE, reencode = NA)

Arguments

file: input SPSS save file. May be a file on the WWW, indicated by file starting with 'http://' or 'https://'.
lowernames: set to TRUE to convert variable names to lower case
datevars: vector of variable names containing dates to be converted to R internal format
use.value.labels: see read.spss
to.data.frame: see read.spss; default is TRUE for spss.get
max.value.labels: see read.spss
force.single: set to FALSE to prevent integer-valued variables from being converted from storage mode double to integer
allow: a vector of characters allowed by R that should not be converted to periods in variable names. By default, underscores in variable names are converted to periods as with R before version 1.9.
charfactor: set to TRUE to change character variables to factors if they have fewer than n/2 unique values. Blanks and null strings are converted to NAs.
reencode: see read.spss

Value

a data frame or list

Author

Frank Harrell

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
w <- spss.get('/tmp/my.sav', datevars=c('birthdate','deathdate'))
  } # }