Read SPSS Data Files and Truncate Space in String Variables and Change Column Width

This function reads SPSS data files using the function read.spss from the foreign package and converts all variables to class character. Additionally, leading and trailing white spaces can be removed from character variables, numeric values can be padded with leading zeros for uniform width of all entries in a column.

Usage

readSpss(file, addLeadingZeros = FALSE, truncateSpaceChar = TRUE)

Arguments

file

Name of the SPSS data file to be read in

addLeadingZeros

Logical: whether values should be transformed to have uniform width in each column, see ‘Details’.

truncateSpaceChar

Logical: whether leading and trailing spaces should be removed from character variables.

Details

If addLeadingZeros=TRUE, the values in each column are transformed to have uniform width by adding leading zeros. The width of a column is determined by the longest value in this column, e.g., if a column contains the values 1, 10, 100 the transformed column will be 001, 010, 100. This can be useful if the values had leading zeros which were removed by reading in the SPSS file.

Value

A data frame. All columns are of class character.