foreign (version 0.8-47)

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

• Invisible NULL.

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) and logical vectors 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)