read.systat             package:foreign             R Documentation

Obtain a Data Frame from a Systat File

Description:

     'read.systat' reads a rectangular data file stored by the Systat
     'SAVE' command as (legacy) '*.sys' or more recently '*.syd' files.

Usage:

     read.systat(file, to.data.frame = TRUE)

Arguments:

    file: character variable with the name of the file to read

to.data.frame: return a data frame (otherwise a list)

Details:

     The function only reads those Systat files that are rectangular
     data files ('mtype = 1'), and warns when files have non-standard
     variable name codings.  The files tested were produced on MS-DOS
     and Windows: files for the Mac version of Systat have a completely
     different format.

     The C code was originally written for an add-on module for Systat
     described in Bivand (1992 paper).  Variable names retain the
     trailing dollar in the list returned when 'to.data.frame' is
     'FALSE', and in that case character variables are returned as is
     and filled up to 12 characters with blanks on the right.  The
     original function was limited to reading Systat files with up to
     256 variables (a Systat limitation); it will now read up to 8192
     variables.

     If there is a user comment in the header this is returned as
     attribute '"comment"'.  Such comments are always a multiple of 72
     characters (with a maximum of 720 chars returned), normally padded
     with trailing spaces.

Value:

     A data frame (or list) with one component for each variable in the
     saved data set.

Author(s):

     Roger Bivand

References:

     Systat Manual, 1987, 1989

     Bivand, R. S. (1992) SYSTAT-compatible software for modelling
     spatial dependence among observations. _Computers and Geosciences_
     *18*, 951-963.

Examples:

     summary(iris)
     iris.s <- read.systat(system.file("files/Iris.syd", package="foreign")[1])
     str(iris.s)
     summary(iris.s)

