SWire4R Documentation
An R package enabling R to interact with Stata for data exchange
Status: Beta
Brought to you by:
lo-magno
home
SWire4R documentation
Introduction
Swire4R is an R package for exchanging data between R and Stata. SWire4R uses SWire for connecting R to Stata. SWire is a plugin for Stata >=13 which acts like a server: client applications can query SWire for interacting with Stata. SWire4R acts like a client application for Swire, providing the user with various basic functions for retrieving data from Stata and exporting data to Stata. SWire4R must be compiled by R. This document will illustrate how to compile SWire4R for Linux and Mac (compiling instructions for Windows are not provided).
SWire4R at a glance
Suppose you load the auto.dta dataset in Stata:
sysuse auto
You wish to obtain the "price" variable in R: load the SWire4R library in R and call the swire.getNumericVar function:
> library(SWire4R) > swire.getNumericVar("price") $status [1] 0 $data [1] 4099 4749 3799 4816 7827 5788 4453 5189 10372 4082 11385 14500 [13] 15906 3299 5705 4504 5104 3667 3955 3984 4010 5886 6342 4389 [25] 4187 11497 13594 13466 3829 5379 6165 4516 6303 3291 8814 5172 [37] 4733 4890 4181 4195 10371 4647 4425 4482 6486 4060 5798 4934 [49] 5222 4723 4424 4172 9690 6295 9735 6229 4589 5079 8129 4296 [61] 5799 4499 3995 12990 3895 3798 5899 3748 5719 7140 5397 4697 [73] 6850 11995
The swire.getNumericVar returns a list with two components. The status component is an integer number, which is zero in the case of no error in executing the request; the data component is a vector containing the data from the "price" variable.
Requirements
Swire4R requires Swire and SWire requires Stata >= 13. In order to compile the package in Linux and Mac, the msgpack-c library (https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-c) and the development files for libcurl (https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/) are required. See below for installation instructions.
Installation
Linux and Mac OS X
In order for R to compile the package on Linux and Mac, msgpack-c (https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-c) and development files for libcurl (https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/) are required.
The following are the commands for installing the msgpack-c library onto your system:
git clone https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-c.git
cd msgpack-c cmake .
make sudo install
Mac OS X has a copy of libcurl in one of its system folders, so installation is not required. The libcurl development files can be installed in Linux (Debian distributions) by typing the following command:
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev
Open R and type the following command to install the SWire4R package:
install.packages("/path_to_swire4r/SWire4R_0.1.tar.gz", repos=NULL, type="source")
where path_to_swire4r is the folder containing the SWire4R_0.1.tar.gz file. If the installation was successful, you can load the package by typing the following in R:
library("SWire4R")
Prior to using SWire4R, do not forget to activate SWire in Stata. Load Stata and type:
swire start
Now return to R and use SWire4R.
Windows
No documentation is provided for Windows in this document.
Reference
A PDF reference manual (SWire4R-manual.pdf) is shipped with the ZIP file which includes SWire4R.
Also see
SWire
A software interface, enabling us to query Stata for the executing of basic operations, such as reading or writing data
2016 Italian Stata Users Group Meeting, Rome 17-18 November
Abstract and slides presented at the Italian Stata Users Group Meeting 2016
SWire Web Apps Collection
A collection of web apps, interacting with Stata through SWire
SWire4js
A JavaScript library for developing SWire web applications
Swire4QGIS
A QGIS plugin enabling data exchange with Stata
SQuery
A web application for collecting questionnaires' responses in Stata
