getData {ufs}

Use a dialog to load data from an SPSS file

Description

getData() and getDat() provide an easy way to load SPSS datafiles.

Usage

getData(
  filename = NULL,
  file = NULL,
  errorMessage = "[defaultErrorMessage]",
  applyRioLabels = TRUE,
  use.value.labels = FALSE,
  to.data.frame = TRUE,
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
  silent = FALSE,
  ...
)

getDat(..., dfName = "dat", backup = TRUE)

Arguments

filename, file

It is possible to specify a path and filename to load here. If not specified, the default R file selection dialogue is shown. file is still available for backward compatibility but will eventually be phased out.

errorMessage

The error message that is shown if the file does not exist or does not have the right extension; ⁠[defaultErrorMessage]⁠ is replaced with a default error message (and can be included in longer messages).

applyRioLabels

Whether to apply the labels supplied by Rio. This will make variables that has value labels into factors.

use.value.labels

Only useful when reading from SPSS files: whether to read variables with value labels as factors (TRUE) or numeric vectors (FALSE).

to.data.frame

Only useful when reading from SPSS files: whether to return a dataframe or not.

stringsAsFactors

Whether to read strings as strings (FALSE) or factors (TRUE).

silent

Whether to suppress potentially useful information.

...

Additional options, passed on to the function used to import the data (which depends on the extension of the file).

dfName

The name of the dataframe to create in the parent environment.

backup

Whether to backup an object with name dfName, if one already exists in the parent environment.

Value

getData returns the imported dataframe, with the filename from which it was read stored in the 'filename' attribute.

getDat is a simple wrapper for getData() which creates a dataframe in the parent environment, by default with the name 'dat'. Therefore, calling getDat() in the console will allow the user to select a file, and the data from the file will then be read and be available as 'dat'. If an object with dfName (i.e. 'dat' by default) already exists, it will be backed up with a warning. getDat() also invisibly returns the data.frame.

Note

getData() currently can't read from LibreOffice or OpenOffice files. There doesn't seem to be a platform-independent package that allows this. Non-CRAN package ROpenOffice from OmegaHat should be able to do the trick, but fails to install (manual download and installation using https://www.omegahat.org produces "ERROR: dependency 'Rcompression' is not available for package 'ROpenOffice'" - and manual download and installation of RCompression produces "Please define LIB_ZLIB; ERROR: configuration failed for package 'Rcompression'"). If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Examples

## Not run: 
### Open a dialogue to read an SPSS file
getData();

## End(Not run)