Haven

Overview

Haven enables R to read and write various data formats used by other statistical packages by wrapping the fantastic ReadStat C library written by Evan Miller. Haven is part of the tidyverse. Currently it supports:

• SAS: read_sas() reads .sas7bdat + .sas7bcat files and read_xpt() reads SAS transport files (version 5 and version 8). write_sas() writes .sas7bdat files.

• SPSS: read_sav() reads .sav files and read_por() reads the older .por files. write_sav() writes .sav files.

• Stata: read_dta() reads .dta files (up to version 14). write_dta() writes .dta files (versions 8-14).

The output objects:

• Are tibbles, which have a better print method for very long and very wide files.

• Translate value labels into a new labelled() class, which preserves the original semantics and can easily be coerced to factors with as_factor(). Special missing values are preserved. See vignette("semantics") for more details.

• Dates and times are converted to R date/time classes. Character vectors are not converted to factors.

Installation

# The easiest way to get haven is to install the whole tidyverse:
install.packages("tidyverse")

# Alternatively, install just haven:
install.packages("haven")

# Or the the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("tidyverse/haven")

Usage

library(haven)

# SAS
read_sas("mtcars.sas7bdat")
write_sas(mtcars, "mtcars.sas7bdat")

# SPSS
read_sav("mtcars.sav")
write_sav(mtcars, "mtcars.sav")

# Stata
read_dta("mtcars.dta")
write_dta(mtcars, "mtcars.dta")