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R-beta: exchanging data between R/Splus and SPSS

7 messages · Friedrich Leisch, Douglas Bates, Peter Dalgaard +2 more

Friedrich Leisch
# 
Hi,

is there any way to exchange (A LOT OF) data between SPPS and R/Splus,
i.e., I want to get data from SPSS into R. It is a huge data frame
with many columns being factors, so manual conversion is out of
question (and there are more data to come).

Exporting ASCII from SPSS seems to loose all level names, and the
portable SPSS format doesn't look too nice.

I've searched S-news and statlib, but only found info about DBMS/copy
which is not installed at our university. Did I miss something?

Any help appreciated,
Fritz Leisch
Douglas Bates
# 
Friedrich Leisch <Friedrich.Leisch at ci.tuwien.ac.at> writes:
Fritz,

You may want to contact Ben Pfaff about this.  Ben is the author of
PSPP, a freely-available SPSS clone.  It may be able to read the SPSS
format and put it into something that would be easier to bring into
R/Splus.
(Ted Harding)
#
On 17-Mar-98 Douglas Bates wrote:
Do you mean Fiasco ( http://gnu.linux.ucla.edu/software/fiasco/ )?

Extract from start of home page:
============================================================================
Fiasco is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It interprets
commands in the SPSS language and produces tabular output in ASCII or
PostScript format. The name Fiasco stands for Fiasco Implements Accurate
Statistical COmputations. 

Fiasco development is ongoing. It already supports a large subset of SPSS's
transformation language. Its statistical procedure support is currently
limited, but growing. 

Source code for the latest development release of Fiasco is available from the
alpha.gnu.org ftp site. 
============================================================================
Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <efh at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Date: 17-Mar-98                                       Time: 19:20:44
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Douglas Bates
# 
(Ted Harding) <efh at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> writes:
Ben can give the definitive answer but AFAIK fiasco has metamorphosed
into PSPP whose development is ongoing.  The latest version of pspp is
0.1.16, available from ftp://pfaffben.user.msu.edu/pspp/
  /ftp at pfaffben.user.msu.edu:/pspp:
  total 15318
  drwxrwxr-x   2 blp      blp          2048 Mar 11 22:04 .
  drwxr-xr-x  11 blp      blp          1024 Feb 27 18:13 ..
  -rw-rw-r--   1 blp      blp             1 Mar 11 22:04 LATEST-IS-0.1.16
  -rw-rw-r--   1 blp      blp           634 Mar 11 22:04 README
  ..
  -rw-rw-r--   1 blp      blp        935097 Mar  9 20:46 pspp-0.1.16.tar.gz

You will see that earlier versions of fiasco are in that directory too.
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Peter Dalgaard
# 
Douglas Bates <bates at stat.wisc.edu> writes:
Affirmative. Is that "Pfaff's Statistical Program Package", BTW? Last
I looked, it hadn't come very far in the way of actual statistics
(concentrating on the database handling issues), and certainly none of
the interactive features of SPSS. I wonder how far it is now?
Ben Pfaff
# 
Affirmative. Is that "Pfaff's Statistical Program Package", BTW? Last
   I looked, it hadn't come very far in the way of actual statistics
   (concentrating on the database handling issues), and certainly none of
   the interactive features of SPSS. I wonder how far it is now?

Hi everyone, this is PSPP's author speaking :-)  FWIW, PSPP has no
``official'' expansion, but the one that I prefer is Putting
Statistics in their Proper Place (in the hands of all users).

I'm afraid that it's still true that the statistical procedures aren't
very advanced.  We have	DESCRIPTIVES and FREQUENCIES fully
implemented.  John Williams has T-TEST mostly finished.  I am going to
start work on CROSSTABS any day now.

However, almost all of the ``database handling'' is done, with just
ADD FILES and UPDATE still wanting.

I'm looking for statistically knowledgeable people who are willing to
help me with algorithms, by the way.  You wouldn't need programming
experience for this, just statistical knowledge (which I don't have).
Contact me in private if you'd like to help.

As for the immediate question of exchanging data between R and SPSS, I
guess I'd need more details before I could be of any real help.
Another good place to ask is the newsgroup comp.soft-sys.stat.spss.  I
read this group as well.
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(Ted Harding)
#
On 17-Mar-98 Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:
Confirmed. ftp://pfaffben.user.msu.edu/fiasco -> pspp and (from the README
under pspp):
==================================================================
This is the distribution archive for PSPP, a free, compatible
replacement for the statistical program SPSS.  PSPP was originally
named Fiasco.

Currently PSPP source code is available from the following sites:

* ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp

This site always has the latest sources for PSPP and patches from
earlier versions.

* ftp://pfaffben.user.msu.edu/pub/pspp

This site has source code tarballs for present and past versions, as
well as patches.  Unfortunately, this site is not available from
mid-December to mid-January or mid-May to mid-August.

Binaries are not yet available for any OS.
==================================================================
Thanks for the responses!
Ted.


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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <efh at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Date: 17-Mar-98                                       Time: 21:05:23
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