Haven allows you to load foreign data formats (SAS, Spss and Stata) in to R by wrapping the ReadStat C library.
The main driver of haven was to make it easy to read SAS's binary format without SAS installed. There is only one other package on CRAN that does that, sas7bdat, but it's implemented in R (not C) so is rather slow compared to haven. Once the SAS binding was complete, it only took a few minutes to add support for Stata and SPSS. You can also load these file types with the foreign package.
Haven is not yet available on CRAN. You can install the development version directly from github with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("hadley/haven")- SAS:
read_sas("path/to/file") - SPSS:
read_por("path/to/file"),read_sav("path/to/file") - Stata:
read_dta("path/to/file")
To get the latest version of readstat into the repo, run this code:
tmp <- tempfile()
download.file("https://github.com/WizardMac/ReadStat/archive/master.zip", tmp,
method = "wget")
unzip(tmp, exdir = tempdir())
src <- dir(file.path(tempdir(), "ReadStat-master", "src"), "\\.[ch]$", full.name = TRUE)
file.copy(src, "src/", overwrite = TRUE)
unlink(c("src/readstat_rdata.c", "src/readstat_rdata.h"))