Rparadox: A Modern Interface for Reading Paradox Databases in R

Rparadox provides a simple and efficient way to read data from Paradox database files (.db) directly into R as modern tibble data frames. It uses the underlying pxlib C library to handle the low-level file format details and provides a clean, user-friendly R interface.

This package is designed to “just work” for the most common use case: extracting the full dataset from a Paradox table, including its associated BLOB/memo file (.mb).

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Features

• Direct Reading: Reads Paradox .db files without needing database drivers or external software.
• Tibble Output: Returns data in the tibble format, which is fully compatible with the Tidyverse ecosystem.
• Automatic BLOB Handling: Automatically detects, attaches, and reads data from associated memo/BLOB (.mb) files.
• Encryption Support: Supports reading password-protected Paradox files.
• Character Encoding Control: Automatically handles character encoding conversion to UTF-8 and allows the user to manually override the source encoding for files with incorrect headers.
• Type Conversion: Correctly maps Paradox data types to their corresponding R types, including Date, Time (hms), Timestamp (POSIXct), Logical, Integer, Numeric, and binary blob objects.

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Installation

Install the stable version from CRAN:

install.packages("Rparadox")

You can install the development version from GitHub using the devtools package.

# install.packages("devtools")
# devtools::install_github("celebithil/Rparadox")
install.packages("Rparadox", repos = c('https://celebithil.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

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Usage

See the package vignette for complete usage examples:

vignette("Rparadox")

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Links

• pxlib C library: https://github.com/steinm/pxlib
• CRAN page: https://cran.r-project.org/package=Rparadox
• Bug reports: https://github.com/celebithil/Rparadox/issues