foreign (version 0.8-2)

read.spss: Read an SPSS Data File

Description

read.spss reads a file stored by the SPSS save or export commands.

Usage

read.spss(file, use.value.labels = TRUE, to.data.frame = FALSE,
          max.value.labels = Inf, trim.factor.names = FALSE,
          trim_values = TRUE, reencode = NA)

Arguments

file

Character string: the name of the file to read.

use.value.labels

Convert variables with value labels into Rfactors with those levels?

to.data.frame

return a data frame?

max.value.labels

Only variables with value labels and at most this many unique values will be converted to factors if use.value.labels = TRUE.

trim.factor.names

Logical: trim trailing spaces from factor levels?

trim_values

logical: should values and value labels have trailing spaces ignored when matching for use.value.labels = TRUE?

reencode

logical: should character strings be re-encoded to the current locale. The default, NA, means to do so in a UTF-* locale, only. Alternatively character, specifying an encoding to assume.

Value

• A list (or data frame) with one component for each variable in the saved data set.

  If what looks like a Windows codepage was recorded in the SPSS file, it is attached (as a number) as attribute "codepage" to the result.

  There may be attributes "label.table" and "variable.labels". Attribute "label.table" is a named list of value labels with one element per variable, either NULL or a names character vector. Attribute "variable.labels" is a named character vector with names the short variable names and elements the long names.

Details

This uses modified code from the PSPP project (http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/ for reading the SPSS formats. Occasionally in SPSS value labels will be added to some values of a continuous variable (eg to distinguish different types of missing data), and you will not want these variables converted to factors. By setting max.val.labels you can specify that variables with a large number of distinct values are not converted to factors even if they have value labels. In addition, variables will not be converted to factors if there are non-missing values that have no value label. The value labels are then returned in the "value.labels" attribute of the variable. If SPSS variable labels are present, they are returned as the "variable.labels" attribute of the answer.

Fixed length strings (including value labels) are padded on the right with spaces by SPSS, and so are read that way by R. The default argument trim_values=TRUE causes trailing spaces to be ignored when matching to value labels, as examples have been seen where the strings and the value labels had different amounts of padding. See the examples for sub for ways to remove trailing spaces in charcter data.

Examples

read.spss("datafile")
## don't convert value labels to factor levels
read.spss("datafile", use.value.labels = FALSE)
## convert value labels to factors for variables with at most
## ten distinct values.
read.spss("datafile", max.val.labels = 10)