mdb_get: Read in an mdb file.
In rdisalv2/dismisc:

Description Usage Arguments Details Value

A shortened, simplified version of Hmisc::mdb.get

1	mdb_get(file, tables = NULL, mdbexportArgs = "", ...)

`file`	mdb file to read. You may need to surround the name in quotes, like '"file name.mdb"'.
`tables`	either a list or vector of table names; tables = TRUE to import a list of tables; or the default which means import all tables
`mdbexportArgs`	arguments to pass to mdb-export. See details for some examples, and man mdb-export for a comprehensive discussion of all possible terminal arguments.
`...`	arguments passed to readr::read_csv.

Still uses mdbtools internally (so that needs to be installed). On Ubuntu, use sudo apt get install mdbtools.

The process is to use mdbtools to convert the mdb table into a csv file, then use readr::read_csv to read the csv file in quickly.

You will commonly want to use mdbexportArgs = '-D%m/%d/%Y' to get the dates right. m means month, d means day, and Y means 4-digit year (note that y would mean 2 digit year). Without explicitly stating this, mdb-export will commonly export as m/d/y format instead, which makes it impossible to tell e.g. 1910 from 2010.

you may also be interested in the common idiom, col_types = cols(.default = col_character()), which tells read_csv to read in all columns as characters. This is guaranteed to avoid parsing failures at the read_csv step.

if only 1 table is read, a tibble. Otherwise, a list of tibbles containing all the tables read in.

rdisalv2/dismisc documentation built on Nov. 2, 2021, 1:34 a.m.