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

[Chuck Cleland]

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.
> 
> 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?

Here is a functiong based on modifying foreign:::writeForeignSPSS (by 
Thomas Lumley) which might work for you:

write.SPSS <- function (df, datafile, codefile, varnames = NULL)
{
adQuote <- function(x){paste("\"", x, "\"", sep = "")}
     dfn <- lapply(df, function(x) if (is.factor(x))
         as.numeric(x)
     else x)
     write.table(dfn, file = datafile, row = FALSE, col = FALSE)
     if(is.null(attributes(df)$variable.labels)) varlabels <- names(df) 
else varlabels <- attributes(df)$variable.labels
     if (is.null(varnames)) {
         varnames <- abbreviate(names(df), 8)
         if (any(sapply(varnames, nchar) > 8))
             stop("I cannot abbreviate the variable names to eight or 
fewer letters")
         if (any(varnames != names(df)))
             warning("some variable names were abbreviated")
     }
     cat("DATA LIST FILE=", dQuote(datafile), " free\n", file = codefile)
     cat("/", varnames, " .\n\n", file = codefile, append = TRUE)
     cat("VARIABLE LABELS\n", file = codefile, append = TRUE)
     cat(paste(varnames, adQuote(varlabels), "\n"), ".\n", file = codefile,
         append = TRUE)
     factors <- sapply(df, is.factor)
     if (any(factors)) {
         cat("\nVALUE LABELS\n", file = codefile, append = TRUE)
         for (v in which(factors)) {
             cat("/\n", file = codefile, append = TRUE)
             cat(varnames[v], " \n", file = codefile, append = TRUE)
             levs <- levels(df[[v]])
             cat(paste(1:length(levs), adQuote(levs), "\n", sep = " "),
                 file = codefile, append = TRUE)
         }
         cat(".\n", file = codefile, append = TRUE)
     }
     cat("\nEXECUTE.\n", file = codefile, append = TRUE)
}

-- 
Chuck Cleland, Ph.D.
NDRI, Inc.
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