readstat1

Usage

Overview

readstat converts data set files from popular statistics packages stored in both plain-text and binary formats.

In the first invocation style, readstat displays metadata from input-file, including the row count, column count, text encoding, and timestamp. input-file should be a file with one of the following extensions:

If the row count cannot be determined from the file header, which is sometimes the case with SPSS binary files and always the case with SPSS portable files, readstat will report a value of -1.

In the second invocation style, readstat converts input-file to output-file, e.g. a SAS portable file to a Stata binary file. In addition to the preceding extension list, output-file may have extension csv or xlsx, which creates a CSV or Excel file, respectively.

The third invocation style is used when additional metadata about the input file, such as value labels or column widths, is stored in a separate file. Several types of metadata file are supported:

sas7bcat

SAS binary "catalog" file, created with SAS version 7 or newer, containing value labels

json

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file, containing column metadata that cannot be gleaned from the input CSV. For details, see the manual page for the extract_metadata command.

dct

Stata dictionary file, containing the data layout and column metadata for a plain-text input file.

sps

SPSS command file, describing the data layout and column metadata for a plain-text input file.

sps

SAS command file, describing the data layout and column metadata for a plain-text input file.

The last three formats can be used for both fixed-width and delimiter-separated (e.g. tab-separated) input files. These are commonly distributed along with plain-text ASCII data sets.

Both input and output formats are implied by the file extension.

Options

-f

Overwrite any existing output-file.