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Import SPSS data

Source: R/import_spss.R
import_spss.Rd

Function to import .sav files while extracting meta information, e.g. variable and value labels.

Usage

import_spss(
  filePath,
  checkVarNames = TRUE,
  labeledStrings = c("drop", "keep", "transform"),
  encoding = NULL
)

Arguments

filePath

Source file location, ending on .sav.

checkVarNames

Should variable names be checked for violations of SQLite and R naming rules?

labeledStrings

Should strings as labeled values be allowed? If "drop" (default), all labeled strings are dropped and NAs occur in the meta data. If "transform", all underlying values are transformed to numeric. If "keep", value labels stay untouched. However, the latter possibly corrupts all labeled values.

encoding

The character encoding used for the file. The default, NULL, use the encoding specified in the file, but sometimes this value is incorrect and it is useful to be able to override it.

Value

Returns a list with the actual data dat and a data frame with all meta information in long format labels.

Details

SPSS files (.sav) store variable and value labels and assign specific formatting to variables. import_spss imports data from SPSS, while storing this meta-information separately in a long format data frame. Value labels and missing labels are used to identify missing values (see checkMissings). Time and date variables are converted to character.

In some special cases, .sav files seem to consist of a mix of different encoding types. In such cases, haven might throw an error if the encoding argument is not specified or UTF-8 is selected as encoding. To circumvent this problem we recommend using encoding = "ASCII" and fixing the resulting issues manually. For example, fixEncoding provides some fixes for encoding issues specific to the German language.

Examples

# Use spss data from within package
spss_path <- system.file("extdata", "pisa.zsav", package = "eatGADS")
pisa_gads <- import_spss(spss_path)