foreign (version 0.8-21)

write.foreign: Write Text Files and Code to Read Them

Description

This function exports simple data frames to other statistical packages by writing the data as free-format text and writing a separate file of instructions for the other package to read the data.

Usage

write.foreign(df, datafile, codefile,
              package = c("SPSS", "Stata", "SAS"), ...)

Arguments

df

A data frame

datafile

Name of file for data output

codefile

Name of file for code output

package

Name of package

...

Other arguments for the individual writeForeign functions

Value

• None

Details

The work for this function is done by foreign:::writeForeignStata, foreign:::writeForeignSAS and foreign:::writeForeignSPSS. To add support for another package, eg Systat, create a function writeForeignSystat with the same first three arguments as write.foreign. This will be called from write.foreign when package="Systat".

Numeric variables and factors are supported for all packages, dates and times (Date, dates, date, and POSIXt classes) are also supported for SAS and characters are supported for SPSS.

For package="SAS" there are optional arguments dataname="rdata" taking a string that will be the SAS data set name and validvarname taking either "V6" or "V7".

Examples

datafile<-tempfile()
codefile<-tempfile()
write.foreign(esoph,datafile,codefile,package="SPSS")
file.show(datafile)
file.show(codefile)
unlink(datafile)
unlink(codefile)