Hi Andrew, You may be able to run the SPSS syntax file using pspp (http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/)
Best, Ista On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 11:23 PM, andrewH <ahoer...@rprogress.org> wrote: > Dear folks – > I have a large (26 gig) ASCII flat file in fixed-width format with about 10 > million observations of roughly 400 variables. (It is 51 years of Current > Population Survey micro data from IPUMS, roughly half the fields for each > record). The file was produced by automatic process in response to a data > request of mine. > > The file is not accompanied by a human-readable file giving the fieldnames > and starting positions for each field. Instead it comes with three command > files that describe the file, one each for SAS SPSS, and Stata. I do not > have ready access to any of these programs. I understand that these files > also include the equivalent of the levels attribute for the coded data. I > might be able to hand-extract the information I need from the command files, > but this would involve days of tedious work that I am hoping to avoid. > > I have read through the R Data Import/Export manual 2 and the foreign > package documentation and I do not see anything that would allow me to > extract the necessary information from these command files. Does anyone know > of any r package or other non-proprietary tools that would allow me to get > this data set from its current form into any of the following formats: > SAS, SPSS or Stata binary files read by R. > A MySQL data base > An ffdf object readable using the ff package. > > My ultimate goal is to get the data into an ffdf object so that I can > manipulate it in R, perhaps by way of a database. In allocation I will > probably be using no more than 20 variables at a time, probably a bit under > a gig. I am working on a machine with three gig of ram. > > (I have seen some suggestions that data.table also provides a > memory-efficient way of providing database-like functions, but I am unsure > whether it would let me cope with an object of this size). > > Any help or suggestions anyone could offer would be very much appreciated. > > Warmest regards, andrewH > > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Getting-information-encoded-in-a-SAS-SPSS-or-Stata-command-file-into-R-tp4649353.html > Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
