[R] read.spss (package foreign) and SPSS 15.0 files

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
> On Apr 6, 2007, at 12:32 PM, John Kane wrote:
> 
>> I have simply moved to exporting the SPSS file to a
>> delimited file and loading it. Unfortunately I'm
>> losing all the labelling which can be time-consuming
>> to redo.    Some of the data has something like 10
>> categories for a variable.
> 
> I save as csv format all the time, and it offers me a choice to use  
> the labels instead of the corresponding numbers. So you shouldn't  
> have to lose that labelling.
> 
> Haris Skiadas
> Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
> Hanover College

That's a different point.  The great advantage of read.spss (and the 
spss.get function in Hmisc that uses it) is that long variable labels 
are supported in addition to variable names.  That's why I like getting 
SPSS or Stata files instead of csv files.  I'm going to enhance csv.get 
in Hmisc to allow a row number to be specified, to contain long variable 
labels.

Frank

> 
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-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University