[R] importing from Stata

[Ronnie Babigumira]

To add onto an already clear explanation (a comment on precision in Stata). Indeed Stata stores all numbers as floats 
(also known as single precision or 4-byte reals). One way you could check this is to save a small subset of your data 
with all numbers as doubles in stata and see how that size of the new Stata file compares with the new file you create in R

(A section on this can be found in the Stata user manual 13.10)


Thomas Lumley wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Dimitri Joe wrote:
> 
>>
>> (i) I get a big R file (for example, a 15Mb Stata file became a 42Mb R
>> file; after cleanup.import() from the Hmisc package, it drooped to 35Mb,
>> but that's still more than 2x the original Stata file) which, in turn, I
>> suspect is due the fact that
>>
>> (ii) factors are created using Stata labels as levels.
> 
> Your suspicion is wrong.
> 
> A more likely explanation is that Stata uses single-precision floating 
> point by default and can use 1-byte and 2-byte integers. R uses double 
> precision floating point and four-byte integers.
> 
> 
>> I wonder if
>>
>> (i) there isn't a way of forcing each variable to be numeric or integer,
>> maintaining it's original values (instead of "Stata labels" as "R
>> levels"). Or,
> 
> Yes. If you read the help page for read.dta() it tells you how.
> 
>  	-thomas
> 
> Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
> tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle
> 
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