Reading in files with two rows for header [duplicate]

Answer 1

Why not just have read.csv read in the first header row (which are the actual headers as i understand your question) then skip the next row:

read.csv(file, header=T, skip=1)

Alternatively, if that second header line begins with an idiosyncratic character (not found in your data) then you can specify that line as a comment line by passing in the character that begins the line as the value to the argument comment.char (if that line began w/ "#" for instance, it would be)::

read.csv(file, header=T, comment.char="#")

Answer 2

Actually I think the easiest way to do this is use the SurveyGizmo SPSS export instead. Export your data to SPSS and then use a similar command in R to:

read.spss(file='mydata.sav')

That should actually work perfectly for you and bring all data description into R as well.

In version 3, the "Quick Export" that's active right now is a single column export and will remain that way – officially supported.

Sadly the older version of this export is too far removed and unoptimized to be able to upgrade it to work with some of the more modern browsers. Especially as the new export is only weeks away from taking over.

In this case, the SPSS Export is the way to go!

Disclaimer: I am working at SurveyGizmo.