pumsr is a simple package for directly importing fixed-width IPUMS data into R using the XML DDI codebook. IPUMS extracts currently only include fixed-width data files and command files for Stata, SPSS, or SAS.
pumsr is currently only available through Github.
# To install the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("elyasb/pumsr")
Simply provide the filenames for the fixed-width data (.dat) and DDI codebook (.xml), and pumsr will create a data frame.
The default import uses original codes for all factor variables. Running pumsr with labels=TRUE will replace factor levels with the category value labels from the codebook. Double-check labels after import, as there are occassionally discrepencies between the number of variable values and the labels in the IPUMS codebook.