PC-Axis with R: pxR

July 24, 2011

By Oscar Perpiñán Lamigueiro

This article was first published on Omnia sunt Communia! » R-english, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers

PC-Axis is a software family consisting of a number of programs for the Windows and Internet environment used to present statistical information. It is used by national and international institutions to publish statistical data. Programs in the PC-Axis family use a particular data file format (see the fullPX-Axis data format description). Now the pxR package is available at CRAN: it provides a set of functions for reading and writing PC-Axis files. This will facilitate the analysis of statistical data to the R community.
The function read.px reads a PC-Axis file from a given location and returns an object of the class px containing all the data and metadata in the PC-Axis file. The single most important piece of infomation with a px object is the data matrix, which can be extracted with function as.data.frame.
For instance,

my.px.object <- read.px("/path/to/pc-axis/file")
my.px.data   <-  as.data.frame(my.px.object)

will create the data.frame my.px.data with the data in the corresponding PC-Axis file.