[R] SPSS and R ? do they like each other?

[Thomas Lumley]

On Wed, 11 Jan 2006, Michael Reinecke wrote:

>
> Thanks again for your answer! I tried it out. write.foreign produces 
> SPSS syntax, but unfortunally this syntax tells SPSS to take the names 
> (and not the labels) in order to produce SPSS variable labels. The 
> former labels get lost.

Well, yes. That's because write.foreign is basically intended for 
exporting R data frame, which don't have variable labels. It should be a 
fairly simple change. Look at
   foreign:::writeForeignSPSS
which is the function that does the work.

 	-thomas

>
> I tried a data frame produced by read.spss and one by spss.get. Here is the read.spss one (the labels meant to be exported are called "Text 1", ...):
>
> jjread<-  read.spss("test2.sav", use.value.labels=TRUE, to.data.frame=TRUE)
>> str(jjread)
> `data.frame':   30 obs. of  3 variables:
> $ VAR00001: num  101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 ...
> $ VAR00002: num  6 6 5 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 ...
> $ VAR00003: num  0 0 6 7 0 7 0 0 0 8 ...
> - attr(*, "variable.labels")= Named chr  "Text 1" "Text2" "text 3"
>  ..- attr(*, "names")= chr  "VAR00001" "VAR00002" "VAR00003"
>>      datafile<-tempfile()
>>      codefile<-tempfile()
>>      write.foreign(jjread,datafile,codefile,package="SPSS")
>>      file.show(datafile)
>>      file.show(codefile)
>
>
> The syntax file I get is:
>
> DATA LIST FILE= "C:\DOKUME~1\reinecke\LOKALE~1\Temp\Rtmp15028\file27910"  free
> / VAR00001 VAR00002 VAR00003  .
>
> VARIABLE LABELS
> VAR00001 "VAR00001"
> VAR00002 "VAR00002"
> VAR00003 "VAR00003"
> .
>
> EXECUTE.
>
>
> I am working on R 2.2.0. But I think a newer version won ´t fix it either, will it?
>
> Greetings,
>
> Michael
>
>
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Chuck Cleland [mailto:ccleland at optonline.net]
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 11. Januar 2006 17:16
> An: Michael Reinecke
> Cc: R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Betreff: Re: [R] SPSS and R ? do they like each other?
>
> Michael Reinecke wrote:
>> ... and is there also such a nice tool (like spss.get) for exporting
>> data frames to SPSS? write.table does not keep the data frame labels -
>> neither did the other exporting tools that I found.
>> ...
>
> library(foreign)
> ?write.foreign
>
> write.foreign(df, datafile, codefile, package = "SPSS")
>
>   The codefile generated is SPSS syntax which will read the datafile and create SPSS variable and value labels.
>
> --
> Chuck Cleland, Ph.D.
> NDRI, Inc.
> 71 West 23rd Street, 8th floor
> New York, NY 10010
> tel: (212) 845-4495 (Tu, Th)
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> fax: (917) 438-0894
>
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Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle