What is this?

Evan Miller wrote a library and command line tool called ReadStat. It lets you read .dta, .por, .sav, and .sas7bat files; and, it lets you translate them to .dta, .por, .sav, .sas7bat, .xlsx, or .csv files. This is useful to me, because I don't want to work in SAS, Stata, or SPSS. And, it feels weird to have to fire up R just to get a new format. This Docker image let's you translate a file from the CLI, without going through the install.

Installation

It's easier to install this as a script. Assuming /usr/local/bin is in your path, do,

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbn/readstat/master/readstat-docker --output /usr/local/bin/readstat-docker
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/readstat-docker

Then, to use it, do,

readstat-docker input.dta output.csv

P.S. I <3 Evan Miller.