dataset - Is there a Python module to open SPSS files?

36
votes

Is there a module for Python to open IBM SPSS (i.e. .sav) files? It would be great if there's something up-to-date which doesn't require any additional dll files/libraries.

4
pythondatasetstatisticspython-modulespss
possible duplicate of Exporting to SPSS files in Python Django? If you want there is also a recipe on active-state – Bakuriu
Hi, Bakuriu. It's not a duplicate, as I'm not referencing the Django framework, I'm talking about opening, as opposed to exporting/writing a file, and I mentioned the preference for something recent which doesn't require external libraries/dlls. There's some common ground between the questions, but they can elicit different, as well as similar, responses. Thanks for the link, but again, I'm trying to avoid dll files, if possible. – Lamps1829
The other answer cites Django, but it actually has nothing to do with it. Since Exporting requires the ability to write a file, the chances that you can also read it are high. Reading around I strongly believe you have only one choice: use the .dll released by IBM. I can't find any open specification for that file format, which means that the only way to read those file is to use IBM's libraries. You can always try to reverse-engineer the format, but that would take much more time and effort. – Bakuriu
Thanks, Bakuriu. It's unfortunate, but as you said, it is looking likely that IBM's .dll release is the thing to use. – Lamps1829

4 Answers

30
votes

I have released a python package "pyreadstat" that reads SPSS (sav, zsav and por), Stata and SAS files. It is a wrapper around the C library ReadStat so it is very fast. Readstat is the library used in the back of the R library Haven, which is widely used and very robust.

The package is autocontained. It does not require using R (no need to install an aditional application) and it does not depend on IBM dlls or other external libraries.

For example, in order to read a SPSS sav file you would do:

import pyreadstat

df, meta = pyreadstat.read_sav("/path/to/sav/file.sav")

df is a pandas dataframe. Meta contains metadata such as variable labels or value labels. read_sav reads both sav and zsav (compressed) files. There is also a function read_por for old por (portable) files.

You can find it here: https://github.com/Roche/pyreadstat

11
votes

Depending on what you want to do--process data using R-related commands from rpy2, or switch to Python--the solution provided by @Spacedman on a related thread might easily be adapted to suit your needs.

Otherwise, Pandas includes a convenient wrapper for rpy2. Here is an example of use with Peat and Barton's weights.sav data set:

>>> import pandas.rpy.common as com
>>> filename = "weights.sav"
>>> w = com.robj.r('foreign::read.spss("%s", to.data.frame=TRUE)' % filename)
>>> w = com.convert_robj(w)
>>> w.head()
     ID  WEIGHT  LENGTH  HEADC  GENDER  EDUCATIO              PARITY
1  L001    3.95    55.5   37.5  Female  tertiary  3 or more siblings
2  L003    4.63    57.0   38.5  Female  tertiary           Singleton
3  L004    4.75    56.0   38.5    Male    year12          2 siblings
4  L005    3.92    56.0   39.0    Male  tertiary         One sibling
5  L006    4.56    55.0   39.5    Male    year10          2 siblings
9
votes

As a note for people findings this later (like me): pandas.rpyhas been deprecated in the newest versions of pandas (>0.16) as noted here. That page includes information on updating code to use the rpy2 interface.

6
votes

When you have pandas >= 0.25.0 you can now finally just do pd.read_spss():

# you need pandas >= 0.25.0 for this    
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_spss('your_spss_file.sav')

This has library pyreadstat as a requirement, so you might have to install that first:

pip install pyreadstat

Extra info on the parameters of pd.read_spss():

Parameters
----------
path