ENH: Make metadata from read_spss available

[mario-bermonti]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

I would like to have the metadata that pyreadstats provides available when reading files from SPSS.

This would be really helpful because it would provide an easy way to have variable labels (descriptions), value labels, and other important metadata available to format results/reports (by replacing the variable names manually with .replace function).

Those kinds of metadata are widely used in social sciences because it makes understanding results really easy. For example, SPSS changes the variable names to the variable labels in the output of analyses. Users could manually do this if the metadata was available.

Describe the solution you'd like

The metadata read by pyreadstats could be stored in the df's _metadata attribute and that would make it readily available

API breaking implications

I don't think there would be any implications if it's stored in the _metadata attribute because it was developed for this kind of use-case. I'm I right?

Describe alternatives you've considered

I could use the pyreadstats directly without using the df.read_spss. I can't think of any other options.

Additional context

This is related to issues #11179 and #39.

[TomAugspurger]

The metadata read by pyreadstats could be stored in the df's _metadata attribute and that would make it readily available

NDFrame._metadata is primarily for subclasses. We would want to use .attrs instead.

[mario-bermonti]

So in theory this shouldn’t cause too much trouble? I’m going to give it a try and get back with the results

[TomAugspurger]

Yeah, won't cause any trouble. There will be some operations that fail to propagate the metadata, and we still need to determine how metadata propagates when multiple dataframes (possibly with different metadata) are involved. But won't cause any issues.

Thanks for working on this.

[mario-bermonti]

Hi. I’m so sorry for this late reply. I haven’t been able to work on this because this last year has been very hard. I hope to work on it sometime in the near future. So I will keep in touch.

[jbrockmendel]

Closed by #55472?