Hello, First please excuse me for reposting the same question I sent a few weeks ago, but I did not have any answer ! 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. In that case, 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, P.S. : complementary info. R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14) i386-pc-mingw32