PC-Axis and the pxR package

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 full PX-Axis data format description or this other technical document). The pxR package provides a set of functions for reading and writing PC-Axis files. This will facilitate the analysis of statistical data to the R community.

Reading PC-Axis files into R

Function read.px reads a PC-Axis file from a given location and returns an object of class px containing all the data and metadata in the original PC-Axis file.

The single most important piece of information within a pxobject is the data matrix, which can be extracted into a R data.frame using 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.