Question

I am using the “foreign” package to read in a large dbf file:

library(foreign)
indata = read.dbf("filepath/filename.dbf")

The problem is that this is reading in all the variable as factors. The usual read.table command has the “stringsAsFactors = F” argument to mitigate this. Is there any equivalent for reading in dbf files?

Answer 1

Yes, it is bundled into “as.is”, see help(read.dbf)

For example:

library(foreign)
x <- read.dbf(system.file("files/sids.dbf", package="foreign")[1])
any(sapply(x, is.factor))
[1] TRUE

y <- read.dbf(system.file("files/sids.dbf", package="foreign")[1], as.is = TRUE)
any(sapply(y, is.factor))
[1] FALSE