R help - Aug 2014 - How to view the whole dataset that is imported through sasxport.get

Dear list,

I used sasxport.get to import a SAS xpt file. Although it is a data frame
but i can't view it through the "fix" command. Also when I see its
structure, it brings up attributes I am not really interested in (which
seems part of the SAS labels) and it doesn't seem to tell me the mode of
each column. How do I suppress those attributes and view it through
"fix"?
Thanks.

Jun

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On Aug 21, 2014, at 7:20 AM, Jun Shen wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> I used sasxport.get to import a SAS xpt file. Although it is a data frame
> but i can't view it through the "fix" command. Also when I
see its
> structure, it brings up attributes I am not really interested in (which
> seems part of the SAS labels) and it doesn't seem to tell me the mode
of
> each column. How do I suppress those attributes and view it through
"fix"?
> Thanks.
It would have helped a lot if you had offered outout of: str(dataset)

I don't use fix() so I'm not sure I help you there. I do notice in
looking at the documentation that the function may return a list of dataframes
rather than just a dataframe, so perhaps you need to extract the dataframe
object. (Just a guess.)

 I generally look at my files with names(), and Hmisc::describe() and use
table() for the factor or character values that I expect to have manageable
numbers of discrete categories. (Using `fix()` to edit gigabyte sized objects is
the way to madness.) You should probably read the Posting Guide because you are
failing to mention that the sasxport.get() function is part of the Hmisc
package. If you want to get rid of your attributes (which is where the labels
are stored)  then the attr() function should allow you to NULL them out:
> x <- 1:10
> attr(x,"dim") <- c(2, 5)
> 
> x
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
[1,]    1    3    5    7    9
[2,]    2    4    6    8   10
> attr(x,"dim")
[1] 2 5
> attr(x,"dim") <- NULL
> x
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

It also appears the there is a `label<-` function, so you could probably use
that to NULL them out.

-- 

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA