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how to read BRFSS file
4 messages · chloe yoon, jim holtman, David Winsemius
Exactly what have you tried and what did not work? I downloaded the '.asc' (text) version of the data and it appears to be fixed format with 1294 characters per line; there are about 414K lines of data in the file. How much of the data do you need to extract? You can read in a portion of the file at a time and then extract just the fields that you need for processing. If it is not too many fields, this should be a reasonable sized object.
On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 7:58 PM, chloe yoon <yoon.chloe at gmail.com> wrote:
hello, I am trying to do exploratory factor analysis with BRFSS dataset ( http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/technical_infodata/surveydata/2008.htm) for a couple of days, but I was not able to do that and got frustrated. Can anybody help me with step by step guide? BRFSS dataset provides ASCII or SAS format. Thank you. chloe ? ? ? ?[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Jim Holtman Cincinnati, OH +1 513 646 9390 What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
On Nov 21, 2009, at 7:58 PM, chloe yoon wrote:
hello, I am trying to do exploratory factor analysis with BRFSS dataset ( http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/technical_infodata/surveydata/2008.htm) for a couple of days, but I was not able to do that and got frustrated. Can
anybody help me with step by step guide? BRFSS dataset provides ASCII or SAS format.
I am not sure I have the time to create a step by step guide for a dataset that is 47 MB long which I don't intend to use. I have experience with loading datasets from NCHS from NHANES. Which dataset do you intend to use? Perhaps if you posed more discrete questions, then people could chime in as you proceeded stap by step. The data layout for the ASCII data is described on: http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/technical_infodata/surveydata/2008/varLayout_table_08.htm So it looks like you will be using either read.sas or read.fwf? Have you tried either one? What experiences or preparation have you you to report?
David Winsemius, MD Heritage Laboratories West Hartford, CT
On Nov 21, 2009, at 8:41 PM, David Winsemius wrote:
On Nov 21, 2009, at 7:58 PM, chloe yoon wrote:
hello, I am trying to do exploratory factor analysis with BRFSS dataset ( http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/technical_infodata/surveydata/2008.htm) for a couple of days, but I was not able to do that and got frustrated. Can
anybody help me with step by step guide? BRFSS dataset provides ASCII or SAS format.
I am not sure I have the time to create a step by step guide for a dataset that is 47 MB long which I don't intend to use. I have experience with loading datasets from NCHS from NHANES. Which dataset do you intend to use? Perhaps if you posed more discrete questions, then people could chime in as you proceeded stap by step. The data layout for the ASCII data is described on: http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/technical_infodata/surveydata/2008/varLayout_table_08.htm So it looks like you will be using either read.sas or read.fwf? Have you tried either one? What experiences or preparation have you you to report?
Actually, that would be foreign:::read.xport, not read.sas.
After downloading andunzipping the sas xport file, the following
worked fairly painlessly. There would also be the option of using
Hmisc:::sasxport.get
library(foreign)
brfss <- read.xport("/Users/davidwinsemius/Downloads/CDBRFS08.XPT")
David Winsemius, MD Heritage Laboratories West Hartford, CT