xml2 is easier to install, thus making the end user experience better.

Change the API for the functions readSSSmetadata(), parseSSSmetadata() and readSSSdata() to all take the argument x.

Throw a warning if the old argument name was used.

The triple-s files I get from our survey programming team sometimes have placeholder values programmed... they've reserved some values, but there is no label. Those come through in the xml as self-closing tags. This causes problems with the function getSSScodes.

I think I've convinced myself that this is actually a problem in the dependency xml2. It doesn't seem to handle the self closing tags. I've put together an example xml snippet, that if put through the relevant lines within getSSScodes reproduces the error I'm seeing.

x<-xml2::read_xml("<variable ident='412' type='single' formname='GotHere' formlabel='GotHere' formtype='single' source='p407369808' routingid='352' fieldwidth='2'>
  <name>GotHere</name>
  <label>GotHere</label>
  <position start='73553' finish='73554'/>
  <values> 
    <value code='1'>INTRO PAGE</value>
    <value code='2'>SCREENER PAGE</value>
    <value code='3'>CONTENT PAGE</value>
    <value code='4'>DEMO PAGE</value>
    <value code='5'>FOLLOW UP PAGE</value>
    <value code='6'/>
    <value code='7'/>
    <value code='8'/>
    <value code='9'/>
  </values>
  </variable>")

xx<-xml2::xml_find_all(x,"values/value")
size<-length(xx)

data.frame(ident = rep(unname(xml2::xml_attr(x, "ident")), 
                       size), code = as.character(xml2::xml_attrs(xx)), codevalues = as.character(xml2::xml_contents(xx)), 
           stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

I get the error: Error in data.frame(ident = rep(unname(xml2::xml_attr(x, "ident")), size), : arguments imply differing number of rows: 9, 5

Even worse, if the xml happened to have the right number of placeholder tags, the content could be recycled without error or warning:

x2<-xml2::read_xml("<variable ident='412' type='single' formname='GotHere' formlabel='GotHere' formtype='single' source='p407369808' routingid='352' fieldwidth='2'>
  <name>GotHere</name>
  <label>GotHere</label>
  <position start='73553' finish='73554'/>
  <values> 
    <value code='1'>INTRO PAGE</value>
    <value code='2'>SCREENER PAGE</value>
    <value code='3'>CONTENT PAGE</value>
    <value code='4'>DEMO PAGE</value>
    <value code='5'>FOLLOW UP PAGE</value>
    <value code='6'/>
    <value code='7'/>
    <value code='8'/>
    <value code='9'/>
    <value code='10'/>
  </values>
  </variable>")

xx2<-xml2::xml_find_all(x2,"values/value")
size<-length(xx2)

data.frame(ident = rep(unname(xml2::xml_attr(x2, "ident")), 
                       size), code = as.character(xml2::xml_attrs(xx2)), codevalues = as.character(xml2::xml_contents(xx2)), 
           stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

Produces the following dataframe with recycled labels:

   ident code     codevalues
1    412    1     INTRO PAGE
2    412    2  SCREENER PAGE
3    412    3   CONTENT PAGE
4    412    4      DEMO PAGE
5    412    5 FOLLOW UP PAGE
6    412    6     INTRO PAGE
7    412    7  SCREENER PAGE
8    412    8   CONTENT PAGE
9    412    9      DEMO PAGE
10   412   10 FOLLOW UP PAGE

Thanks for this Package !

Is it possibile to modifiy read.sss function so that it returns not only the attribute variable.labels but also an attribute assoicated with the codes (this attributes could be name label.table) ?*

For instance, we should have

attributes(d)$variable.labels
 [1] "Number of visits"                  "Attractions visited"               "Attractions visited"              
 [4] "Attractions visited"               "Attractions visited"               "Attractions visited"              
 [7] "Attractions visited"               "Attractions visited"               "Attractions visited"              
[10] "Attractions visited"               "Other attractions visited"         "Two favourite attractions visited"
[13] "Two favourite attractions visited" "Miles travelled"                   "Would come again"                 
[16] "When is that most likely to be"    "Case weight"    

But also attributes(d)$label.tableshould be a list (each element should be NULL or a name vector), with for instance

attributes(d)$label.table[[1]]
        Sherwood Forest       Nottingham Castle "Friar Tuck" Restaurant      "Maid Marion" Cafe           Mining museum 
                      1                       2                       3                       4                       5 
                  Other 
                      9 

Thanks !

Dominique

Hello,

would it be possible to implement a function that writes a triple-s data file?

Best and thanks,
Robert

Hi thank you for the package, as I try to understand how it works, I am having problems importing. I have a sss and csv files with same filename. I have used the read.sss() function. R creates the data frame and the variables seems to be there but for example the number of observations is not correct. If I try to view the dataframe in R studio view() I receive an error such as "no data in column ...".
I have tries with the sample files inside the sss package and it works fine.
I have also tried with the files downloaded from the triple-s offial website and I receive the same error. You could use the latter files to reproduce my error.
I am using
R 4 and R studio 2022.02.3 and sss version 0.2.1 and xml2 version 1.3.3

Thank you for any help you could provide

Hello,
thank you for this great package.
I figured a problem with parsing the metadata for my triple-s file. It is just affecting the data labels for my variables. My xml code looks like this for variable declaration:

...
<variable ident="5" type="single" format="numeric">
<name>typtel</name>
<label>
<text xml:lang="fr-FR" mode="analysis">TYPTEL-Telephone Type</text>
</label>
<position start="16" />
<values>
<value code="1">Fixed<text xml:lang="fr-FR" mode="analysis">Fixed</text></value>
<value code="2">Mobile<text xml:lang="fr-FR" mode="analysis">Mobile</text></value>
</values>
</variable>
...

I can parse the xml code, but in R, I can see that this in fact returns a code dataframe with invalid entries:

Is there a way to solve this with the package, without having to delete all of the <text> entries (which gives the right results?)

Thank you for your help
Julia

Make it possible to write:

read.sss("sample.sss")

and the function then automatically guesses the asc filename as sample.asc

This will make the package easier to use.