Using Stata Variable Labels in R

Question

I have a bunch of Stata .dta files that I would like to use in R.

My problem is that the variable names are not helpful to me as they are like \"q0100,\" \"q0565,\"

Answer 1

When using the haven package:

if the data set you are importing is heavy, viewing the data in Rstudio might not be optimal.

You can instead get a data.frame with column names, column labels and an indicator for whether the column is labelled:

d <- read_dta("your_stata_data.dta") 

vars <- data.frame(
                   "name" = names(d),
                   "label" = sapply(d, function(x) attr(x, "label"))  %>% as.character(),
                   "labelled" = sapply(d, is.labelled) )

Note: need to use as.characted in order to avoid NULL in the labels being dropped and therefore ending up with different vector lengths.