Export data to RDS files

[Ale Rossi]

Hello,
For my work, I am using a combination of Stata and R. I would like to export my data from Stata saving it to an ". rds" format, in order to keep the labels of my variables once I import everything bak into R.

Is there any way to do this? thanks a lot for your help


Best regards

[Joseph Luchman]

Hi Ale,

The only way I know to retain Stata meta-data about variables that do not have a base R analog (e.g., dataset labels, variable labels, extended missing values, and display formats) is to use the -haven- package with the read_dta() function.

From there, you can use saveRDS() to store the R object and all the meta-data will be stored as well.

Have to be careful as you work with the data in R though. Many R functions drop object attributes like labels that -haven- stores thus to be able to back-translate into Stata and have the write_dta() function store the labels and other meta-data correctly, they have to be retained. This is not easy to do and I cannot advise on how to do this just to warn that it is easy to lose these object attributes when working in R as the language does not prioritize retaining them as does Stata.

- joe

[Ale Rossi]

Dear Joseph,
thanks a lot for your reply, but unfortunately I fear it does not address my issue. Indeed, I have a ".dta" file that works great in Stata 15, but using haven to import it into data produces the following error message: Failed to parse /Users/folder/my_data.dta: Unable to allocate memory. I have also tried to export it as a delimited file using

export delimited

It has a problem in formatting the very long strings and loses a lot of information once I re-imported into R - the data contains strL or str#, #>244.

Is there any other export format that I could try for my file in order to safely import it into R? Alternatively do you know what may cause the error in haven

thanks a lot in advance for your help

[Oscar Ozfidan]

I dont know about different export formats but I would try export to excel and then use the excel file to import into R. In my experience Excel export has been very robust....

[Ale Rossi]

Thanks oscar for the suggestion, the issue with your suggested approach is that it only works for a small dataset that excel can handle, for very large datasets I do not think it works