R and necessary packages

StatConverter is just a Graphical User Interface on top of an embedded R environment. This means the convertion can be achieved in the normal R console via command line, using the function convert().

The actual package that does the heavy lifting is called DDIwR (DDI with R), which uses the package haven which in turn uses an excellent C library called ReadStat. All of these are open source software, and get improved on a constant basis.

Installing the R packages to the latest version

The official versions of these packages are located on CRAN, and they can be (re)installed using the command:

install.packages("DDIwR", dependencies = TRUE)

These packages will likely change versions and future functionality will necessarily depend on updated versions of the R packages, especially DDIwR that relies on a number of other packages, among which admisc and declared.

The very latest development versions of these packages are located on GitHub. To install those, package remotes has to be installed and then loaded:

library(remotes)
install_github(
    c("dusadrian/admisc", "dusadrian/declared", "dusadrian/DDIwR")
)

Some of these packages contain C code that need compilation. Users who do not have the necessary build tools can install a precompiled binary version from a different package management server, incrementally updated for each pre-CRAN development version of the packages:

options(repos = c("dusadrian.r-universe.dev", getOption("repos")))
install.packages(c("admisc", "declared", "DDIwR"))

For more detailed information, visit Adrian Dușa's R-universe repository.