Odp: [R] New version of read.spss requires scripts to be re-written

[Thomas Lumley]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2002, Michal Bojanowski wrote:
>
> Because I have to use SPSS everyday (for 'compatibility' reasons at work) I
> use
> read.spss() very often. I have one suggestion for further improvements of
> this function.
> I work on quite large data files (1600 vars, 10000 cases), which cannot be
> loaded to R because of
> lack if memory. It would be very usefull to be able to 'browse' SPSS files
> 'variablewise'. That is
> for example to 'extract' only a group of variables (even a single one)
> without loading the whole data.
> Making a bunch of smaller files in SPSS and than importing them to R with
> read.spss() is
> rather inconvinient.
>
> What do You think of such an improvement?
>

Well, we don't need any extra SPSS input/output code, since all that is
already in the foreign package. It should be fairly simple (if slightly
inefficient) to change the C code so  that most variables are read and
thrown away rather than being read and stored in memory.


	-thomas

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._