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

[John Kane]

--- Frank E Harrell Jr <f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu>
wrote:

> 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
> 
 Ah, I missed that point. I think it is a "little" 
bit less important to me but I do notice that I
'label' just about everything.  Trying to rememeber
what "sexy" meant 3 months ago is not always easy even
when I'm reading the code. :)

The enhancement will, definitely, be appreciated.