I often read SPSS system files (*.sav) into R using the 'read.spss' function
from the 'foreign' library. To retain all the meta data, i.e. 'variable
labels', I call the function like this:
test.sav <-
read.spss('http://www.cdc.gov/healthyYouth/shpps/2006/spss/envs2006.sav',
to.data.frame=FALSE,
use.value.labels=TRUE
)
This returns a list, which is fine. However. How do I merge data to this list,
keeping the list components intact? Let's assume I have a dataframe that looks
like this:
df <- data.frame(id=rep(1:100),data=runif(100, min=0, max=1))
I want to add the column 'df$data' to 'test.sav' by matching the columns 'd$id'
with 'test.sav$stcmsid'. If I use 'merge', the resulting class is 'data.frame',
hence the variable labels from 'test.sav' will be silently dropped.
Is there an elegant way to merge data to a list like 'test.sav', or should I
just save 'attr(test.sav, "variable.labels")' and be done with it?
TIA
/s
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