I have a .dta file which has variable labels for each variable. Once imported to R, how can I view these labels?

Question

I imported a .dta (Stata file format) into R, but it looks like the variable labels did not get imported along with the variable names.

• Using foreign::read.dta, I tried labels(df), but that only gives me the variable names; and str(df$var) is also is not telling me label.
• Using a function from the haven package, attributes(df$var) gives me levels and class, but not variable label.

Am I missing something here?

• Parfait: Per haven docs (assuming this is your package), Variable labels are stored in the "label" attribute of each variable. Check: attributes(df$col1).
• Frank: If Parfait's pointer doesn't resolve it, you may need to add more information (like the tool you used for import, maybe the Stata version). You could also try str(DF) to look around for the labels more.
• Christoph: Does that help stackoverflow.com/a/25850262/5784831?
• laura bmw: @parfait - I just tried the haven package and attributes(df$var), which gives me levels and class, but not variable label.
• smci: First, it's useful to state that .dat is a Stata file format; 99% of users won't know - I added that in body and tags. Second, I believe you're talking about making sure categorical labels get imported right, right? Can you narrow the issue down to whether they're getting correctly exported from Stata to the .dta file (can you show us a snippet of .dta file?), or imported from .dta file to R?

Answer 1

To see variable labels in R, it depends on how the Stata file is imported. Just using the foreign package (command read.dta) does not import variable labels.

Use the haven package to import the Stata file (read_dta command). Using the attributes command via haven package (@parfait) will give you format, class, and levels, in addition to variable label. However, if you only want to see the variable labels, then use the var_lab command from the expss package.

 library(haven)
 df <- read_dta(file="df.dta")
 library(expss)
 lapply(df, var_lab)
 # OR
 var_lab(df$var)