Loading large .pxt and .asc datasets causes issues.

hi eiko, LaF is incompatible with survey data, that road is a dead-end.
this code below will painlessly load brfss into R, review the link douglas
sent for analysis examples and change `years.to.download <- ` to 2006 only
if you just want a single year of microdata.  glhf


# install.packages( c("MonetDB.R", "MonetDBLite" , "survey" , "SAScii" ,
"descr" , "downloader" , "digest" ) , repos=c("
http://dev.monetdb.org/Assets/R/", "http://cran.rstudio.com/"))

# setInternet2( FALSE )                        # # only windows users need
this line
# options( encoding = "windows-1252" )        # # only macintosh and *nix
users need this line
library(downloader)
# setwd( "C:/My Directory/BRFSS/" )
years.to.download <- 1984:2014
source_url( "
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ajdamico/asdfree/master/Behavioral%20Risk%20Factor%20Surveillance%20System/download%20all%20microdata.R"
, prompt = FALSE , echo = TRUE )





On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 4:39 PM, Federman, Douglas <
Douglas.Federman at utoledo.edu> wrote:

You might want to look at Anthony Damico's work at


http://www.asdfree.com/search/label/behavioral%20risk%20factor%20surveillance%20system%20%28brfss%29

--
Better name for the general practitioner might be multispecialist.
~Martin H. Fischer (1879-1962)


-----Original Message-----
From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Torvon
Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2016 2:13 PM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] Loading large .pxt and .asc datasets causes issues.

Hi,

I want to load a dataset into R. This dataset is available in two formats:
.XPT and .ASC. The dataset is available at
http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/annual_data/annual_2006.htm.

They are about 40mb zipped, and about 500mb unzipped.

I can get the .xpt data to load, using:

library(hmisc)
data <- sasxport.get("CDBRFS06.XPT")

The data look fine, no error messages. However, the data only contains
302 columns, which is less than it should have (according to the
documentation). It does not contain my variables of interest, so either the
documentation or the data file is wrong, and I want to make sure it's not
the data file.

Hence I wanted to see if I get the same results loading the .ASC file.
However, multiple ways to do so have failed.

library(adehabitat)
import.asc("CDBRFS06.asc")

Results in:
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
: scan() expected 'a real', got '1191.8808943.38209868648.960119'

library(SDMTools)
read.asc("CDBRFS06.asc")

Results in:
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
: scan() expected 'a real', got '1191.8808943.38209868648.960119' In
addition: Warning messages: 1: In scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote,
skip, nlines, na.strings, : number of items read is not a multiple of the
number of columns 2: In scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip,
nlines, na.strings, : number of items read is not a multiple of the number
of columns 3: In scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines,
na.strings, : number of items read is not a multiple of the number of
columns 4: In scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines,
na.strings, : number of items read is not a multiple of the number of
columns 5: In scan(file, nmax = nl * nc, skip = 6, quiet = TRUE) : NAs
introduced by coercion to integer range

Thank you for your help.
   Eiko

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