Hi, 

 

I'm new to R so this might be a little basic for enlightened people like
yourselves...

 

I have quarterly British Labour Force Survey (Local Area) data from 1992 to
present in .tab format* in folders running from 01 (for the first time
period) to 56 (for the most recent).

 

i.e. my directory structure is:

      .../t/

            01

            ...

            56

       

Taking the result of dir() on the t/ directory I can get access to each
subdirectory as an element in a vector of strings (i.e. element [n] points
to directory n) Using a regex sequence I can specify only the lad .tab file
within each directory (as they each contain another .tab datafile for higher
level geographical regions)

 

I now need to load all the data into a 3d dataframe,** where the first
dimension refers to the t value (01...56), and I can access it to make
longitudinal comparisons between variables.

 

How do I do this?

 

Thanks for your help,

 

Jon

 

* some of the data was only available in other formats: does R read SPSS
.por (portable) data? If not I'll just convert it.

** or would it be better to just mark the data from each t with a new
variable, and have it as a long file?

 

 

 

 


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