In dkyleward/caliperR: Interacct with Caliper Software from R

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

library(caliperR)
dk <- connect()

Intro

Caliper software makes use of a number of custom file formats. Tabular data is routinely stored in fixed-format binary (FFB) files with extension ".bin". The caliperR package allows you to read and write these files even if you don't have Caliper software installed on your machine (although it is faster if you do).

Reading bin data

The caliperR package comes with a sample bin file for this vignette.

bin_file <- system.file(
  "extdata", "gisdk", "testing", "toy_table.bin", package = "caliperR"
)

Use the read_bin() function to bring it into R.

df <- read_bin(bin_file)
df

Field descriptions

If the bin file has field descriptions, they are preserved. They will appear when using View() in Rstudio, but can also be seen using the Hmisc package.

# View(df)

descriptions <- Hmisc::label(df)
descriptions

Field display names

Lastly, the caliperR package can also read and return any display names that may be assigned to the FFB table.

display_names <- read_bin(bin_file, returnDnames = TRUE)
display_names

You can substitute display names for the field names using colnames().

df2 <- df
colnames(df2) <- display_names
df2

Writing bin data

Use the write_bin() function to write the data back out to a bin file. The descriptions and display_names arguments are optional.

temp_bin <- tempfile(fileext = ".bin")
write_bin(df, temp_bin, descriptions, display_names)

dkyleward/caliperR documentation built on Dec. 31, 2021, 7:11 p.m.