Hello, I am trying to "manually" choose the width (i.e. number of character allowed) of columns containing text when creating dbf. files using write.dbf (library foreign). In particular, I want to define this width when the column have to contain text but is empty. By default, write.dbf give a warning message then choose the width equal to the number of character in the column title. Example: df<-data.frame(INDEX=1:10, TEXT=NA_character_) write.dbf(df, paste(choose.dir(), "//test.dbf",sep="")) # Give a warning message but create the dbf file. The width of the column "TEXT" is 4 as the number of character in the word TEXT ! Thanks for your help, Arnaud [[alternative HTML version deleted]]