readstata13: Read and write the ‘Stata’ file format with R

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Package to read and write all Stata file formats (version 17 and older) into a R data.frame. The dta file format versions 102 to 121 are supported (including dtas files).

The function read.dta from the foreign package imports only dta files from Stata versions <= 12. Due to the different structure and features of dta 117 files, we wrote a new file reader in Rcpp.

Additionally the package supports many features of the Stata dta format like label sets in different languages (?set.lang) or business calendars (?as.caldays).

Installation

The package is hosted on CRAN.

install.packages("readstata13")

Usage

library(readstata13)
dat <- read.dta13("path to file.dta")
save.dta13(dat, file="newfile.dta")

Development Version

To install the current release from github you need the platform specific build tools. On Windows a current installation of Rtools is necessary, while OS X users need to install Xcode.

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("sjewo/readstata13", ref="0.11")

To install the current development version from github:

remotes::install_github("sjewo/readstata13", ref="testing")

Changelog and Features

| Version | Changes | |:---|:---| | 0.11.0 | Initial support for Stata 18. Import .dtas files (Stata framesets) via read.dtas(). Alias variables are currently ignored with a warning. | | | The select.cols argument accepts either variable names or column indices. | | | Fix compilation on musl and other non-glibc based systems. | | | Add package alias to readstata13.Rd |

See News for the full changelog.

readstata13 and foreign

Most attributes of the resulting data.frame are largely similar to the data.frames produced by foreign. Since newer Stata files require some additional attributes, the results of all.equal() and identical() will be FALSE for data.frames read by foreign::read.dta and read.dta13(). Otherwise, the data.frames produced by both functions are identical.

library(foreign)
library(readstata13)

# with factors
r12 <- read.dta("http://www.stata-press.com/data/r12/auto.dta")
r13 <- read.dta13("http://www.stata-press.com/data/r13/auto.dta")

all.equal(r12, r13, check.attributes = FALSE)

# without factors
r12 <- read.dta("http://www.stata-press.com/data/r12/auto.dta", 
                convert.factors = FALSE)
r13 <- read.dta13("http://www.stata-press.com/data/r13/auto.dta", 
                  convert.factors = FALSE)

all.equal(r12, r13, check.attributes = FALSE)

Authors

Marvin Garbuszus (JanMarvin) and Sebastian Jeworutzki (sjewo)

Licence

GPL2