I have a password protected zip archive containing one SPSS system data file (*.sav). And I want to unpack it and read its content into R. From what I googled, Hmisc::getZip seems to be the best bet. And I've tried some different approaches.
First try was to just run the function, hoping that it would spit out the *.sav file in my getwd() location.
getZip(url = '/path/to/data.zip',
password = 'foo'
)
But this command returns:
"unzip -p -P foo data.zip"
class
"pipe"
mode
"r"
text
"text"
opened
"closed"
can read
"yes"
can write
"yes"
And after reading the help file, the getZip() function seems to return a file O/I pipe. So my second try was to use getZip() inside read.spss(). Like this:
data <- read.spss(getZip(url = '/path/to/data.zip',
password = 'foo')
)
But no love:
Error in read.spss(getZip(url = '/path/to/data.zip', password = 'foo')) :
unable to open file: 'No such file or directory'
When I take the command from my first try "unzip -p -P foo data.zip" and run it (with an added "> data.sav") from the command line I get the SPSS file. So something is working. My third try was to use the connection:
file_connection <- getZip(url = '/path/to/data.zip', password = 'foo')
open(file_connection, 'rb')
data <- readBin(file_connection, raw())
close(file_connection)
I was hoping to save the data object to an *.sav file and read it back into R with the read.spss() function. But the data object is not an SPSS file:
> data
[1] 24
So... How should I successfully unpack and read the *.sav file from the password protected zip archive into R?
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.3.0 (2016-05-03)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS
locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=sv_SE.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=sv_SE.UTF-8 LC_NAME=sv_SE.UTF-8
[9] LC_ADDRESS=sv_SE.UTF-8 LC_TELEPHONE=sv_SE.UTF-8
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=sv_SE.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=sv_SE.UTF-8
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
other attached packages:
[1] gmailr_0.7.1 rj_2.0.5-1
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_0.12.5 Formula_1.2-1 cluster_2.0.4
[4] magrittr_1.5 splines_3.3.0 munsell_0.4.3
[7] rj.gd_2.0.0-1 colorspace_1.2-6 lattice_0.20-33
[10] R6_2.1.2 httr_1.1.0 plyr_1.8.3
[13] tools_3.3.0 nnet_7.3-12 grid_3.3.0
[16] data.table_1.9.6 gtable_0.2.0 latticeExtra_0.6-28
[19] openssl_0.9.3 survival_2.39-4 Matrix_1.2-6
[22] gridExtra_2.2.1 RColorBrewer_1.1-2 ggplot2_2.1.0
[25] base64enc_0.1-3 acepack_1.3-3.3 rpart_4.1-10
[28] curl_0.9.7 scales_0.4.0 Hmisc_3.17-4
[31] jsonlite_0.9.20 chron_2.3-47 foreign_0.8-66
EDIT: OK. So I have a (not so elegant) workaround. I'm using a system() call with the wait = TRUE argument to unpack the file. Like this:
system(command = paste0('unzip -P foo ', data.zip),
wait = TRUE
)
Then I can read the *.sav file into R. But I still don't understand how to use Hmisc::getZip()
