Re: [R] read.spss (package foreign) and character columns
RINNER Heinrich wrote: In R: library(foreign) test - read.spss(test.sav, to.data.frame=T) test XCHAR 1 a 2 ab 3 abcde levels(test$XCHAR) [1] a ababcde Shouldn't it rather be a ab abcde (no blanks)? I think, that should be no problem since the blanks in XCHAR may be easily removed with gsub() If you have s-c(a,ab ,ab cd ) then gsub( ,,s) [1] aab abcd removes all spaces or gsub( *$,,s) [1] a abab cd removes all trailing spaces. Hope this helps! Thomas P. __ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
RE: [R] read.spss (package foreign) and character columns
Thanks to Brian Ripley, Douglas Bates and Thomas Petzoldt for their comments. I agree that it is not really a problem, as you can easily use sub() after read.spss() to get rid of the blanks (I had already done that). On the other hand, it might be important to _know_ about the fact that characters are filled with blanks here. [I noticed it because I used a character variable as the common column in a merge(tab1,tab2,by=XCHAR), where tab1 came into R from an SPSS file using read.spss(), and tab2 came into R from an Excel file via odbc using odbcConnectExcel(). The merge failed on some cases, because some values of XCHAR from tab1 had trailing blanks, the values of tab2 had none.] I know now, so I know what to do in future cases. But as not everybody else might be aware of this, my suggestion would be that it could be worth adding a short comment about this in help(read.spss), so noone will be surprised. Regards, Heinrich. -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: RINNER Heinrich [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: Mittwoch, 27. August 2003 18:06 An: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Betreff: [R] read.spss (package foreign) and character columns Dear R users! I am using R Version 1.7.1, Windows XP, package foreign (Version: 0.6-1), SPSS 11.5.1. There is one thing I noticed with read.spss, and I'd like to ask if this is considered to be a feature, or possibly a bug: When reading character columns, character strings seem to get filled with blanks at the end. Simple example: In SPSS, create a file with one variable called xchar of type A5 (character of length 5), and 3 values (a, ab, abcde), save it as test.sav. In R: library(foreign) test - read.spss(test.sav, to.data.frame=T) test XCHAR 1 a 2 ab 3 abcde levels(test$XCHAR) [1] a ababcde Shouldn't it rather be a ab abcde (no blanks)? -Heinrich. __ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help __ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
[R] read.spss (package foreign) and character columns
Dear R users! I am using R Version 1.7.1, Windows XP, package foreign (Version: 0.6-1), SPSS 11.5.1. There is one thing I noticed with read.spss, and I'd like to ask if this is considered to be a feature, or possibly a bug: When reading character columns, character strings seem to get filled with blanks at the end. Simple example: In SPSS, create a file with one variable called xchar of type A5 (character of length 5), and 3 values (a, ab, abcde), save it as test.sav. In R: library(foreign) test - read.spss(test.sav, to.data.frame=T) test XCHAR 1 a 2 ab 3 abcde levels(test$XCHAR) [1] a ababcde Shouldn't it rather be a ab abcde (no blanks)? -Heinrich. __ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
Re: [R] read.spss (package foreign) and character columns
On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, RINNER Heinrich wrote: Dear R users! I am using R Version 1.7.1, Windows XP, package foreign (Version: 0.6-1), SPSS 11.5.1. There is one thing I noticed with read.spss, and I'd like to ask if this is considered to be a feature, or possibly a bug: When reading character columns, character strings seem to get filled with blanks at the end. Simple example: In SPSS, create a file with one variable called xchar of type A5 (character of length 5), and 3 values (a, ab, abcde), save it as test.sav. In R: library(foreign) test - read.spss(test.sav, to.data.frame=T) test XCHAR 1 a 2 ab 3 abcde levels(test$XCHAR) [1] a ababcde Shouldn't it rather be a ab abcde (no blanks)? You said it was a character string of length 5, not =5. It's easy to strip trailing blanks (?sub has several ways). -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UKFax: +44 1865 272595 __ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
Re: [R] read.spss (package foreign) and character columns
RINNER Heinrich [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Dear R users! I am using R Version 1.7.1, Windows XP, package foreign (Version: 0.6-1), SPSS 11.5.1. There is one thing I noticed with read.spss, and I'd like to ask if this is considered to be a feature, or possibly a bug: When reading character columns, character strings seem to get filled with blanks at the end. Simple example: In SPSS, create a file with one variable called xchar of type A5 (character of length 5), and 3 values (a, ab, abcde), save it as test.sav. In R: library(foreign) test - read.spss(test.sav, to.data.frame=T) test XCHAR 1 a 2 ab 3 abcde levels(test$XCHAR) [1] a ababcde Shouldn't it rather be a ab abcde (no blanks)? I believe they are being saved as fixed length strings in the SPSS file and R is just reading what it was given. __ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
