Introduction to the haven and foreign R packages

The R package called haven is for import and export from SPSS, Stata and SAS files. The package is for Labelled Data Utility Functions, which is a collection of many small functions dealing with labelled data, such as reading and writing data between R and other statistical software packages such as SAS, SPSS, or Stata, and working with labelled data.

This includes easy ways to get, set, and change value and variable label attributes, convert labelled vectors into factors or numeric values (and vice versa), and deal with multiple declared missing values. The following example is about writing several specific outputs:

library(haven)
x<-1:100
y<-matrix(x,50,2)
z<-data.frame(y)
colnames(z)<-c("a","b")
write_sas(z,"c:/temp/tt.sas7bdat")
write_spss(z,"c:/temp/tt.sav")
write_stata(z,"c:/temp/tt.dta")

Another R package called foreign can be used to read SPSS, and SAS data. Here is one example. First, let's download a SPSS dataset called airline_passanges.sav at http://calcnet.mth.cmich.edu/org/spss/Prj_airlinePassengers.htm. Assume that the related SPCC data is saved under c:/temp:

library(foreign) 
x<-read.spss("c:/temp/airline_passengers.sav", to.data.frame=TRUE) 
dim(x) 
[1] 144   1