ambers

Pure Rust SPSS .sav/.zsav reader — Arrow-native, zero C dependencies.

Features

• Read .sav (bytecode) and .zsav (zlib) files
• Arrow RecordBatch output — zero-copy to Polars, DataFusion, DuckDB
• Rich metadata: variable labels, value labels, missing values, MR sets, measure levels
• 2–3x faster than pyreadstat
• Python + Rust dual API from a single crate

Installation

Python:

pip install ambers

Rust:

cargo add ambers

Quick Start

Python

import ambers as am

# Read data + metadata
df, meta = am.read_sav("survey.sav")

# Explore metadata
meta.summary()
meta.describe("Q1")
meta.value("Q1")

# Read metadata only (fast, skips data)
meta = am.read_sav_metadata("survey.sav")

Rust

use ambers::{read_sav, read_sav_metadata};

// Read data + metadata
let (batch, meta) = read_sav("survey.sav")?;
println!("{} rows, {} cols", batch.num_rows(), meta.number_columns);

// Read metadata only
let meta = read_sav_metadata("survey.sav")?;
println!("{}", meta.label("Q1").unwrap_or("(no label)"));

Metadata API (Python)

All variable-name methods raise KeyError for unknown variables.

Streaming Reader (Rust)

let mut scanner = ambers::scan_sav("survey.sav")?;
scanner.select(&["age", "gender"])?;
scanner.limit(1000);

while let Some(batch) = scanner.next_batch()? {
    println!("Batch: {} rows", batch.num_rows());
}

Performance

License

MIT