SEERreadr

Read SEER Data Files

The main workhorse of this package is seer_read_fwf(). This function wraps readr::read_fwf() to import the SEER fixed-width ASCII data files, using the column names and field width definitions in the SEER SAS script.

The data files are available from the SEER Data & Software page, where users must request access prior to downloading. The SAS script is included in the file download, or avilable online. The online version is used by seer_read_fwf(), but a local version can be specified in the helper function seer_read_col_positions("local_file.sas").

library(SEERreadr)
x <- seer_read_fwf("incidence/yr1973_2015.seer9/MALEGEN.TXT")

Recode SEER Variables

Two additional functions are provided to help recode the SEER data. seer_recode() uses the seer_data_dictionary data provided in this package to automatically recode all variables with a one-to-one correspondence, for example:

seer_data_dictionary$SEX
#> # A tibble: 2 x 2
#>   Code  Description
#> * <chr> <chr>      
#> 1 1     Male       
#> 2 2     Female

The package also includes the function seer_rename_site_specific() that can be used to replace the site-specific variables with their corresponding labels, formatted appropriately to serve as variable names. As an example, CSSSF variables for Breast cancer would be renamed according to the following table.