Is there a Python module to open SPSS files?

python dataset statistics python-module spss
Lamps1829 picture Lamps1829 · Feb 1, 2013 · Viewed 36.7k times · Source

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.

Answer

Otto Fajardo picture Otto Fajardo · Aug 22, 2018

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

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