Read a LimeSurvey .lss file — read

Read a LimeSurvey survey structure export (.lss, an XML file) and turn it into a structured lss object that the rest of the package can audit (audit_lss()) and render (render_questionnaire(), render_audit()). Parsing is fully local: the file is never uploaded anywhere.

Usage

read_lss(file)

Arguments

file: Character. Path to a .lss file. Must be a single string pointing to an existing file, otherwise a classed error is raised (lssdoc_bad_path, lssdoc_file_not_found).

Value

An object of class lss: a list with the survey languages, metadata, and one data frame per .lss section. Structural sections (surveys, groups, questions, subquestions, answers, question_attributes, conditions) stay separate from the localized text sections (survey_language_settings, group_l10ns, question_l10ns, answer_l10ns), which carry the per-language titles, labels, and help texts. All values are read verbatim as character.

Details

The .lss format is a LimeSurvey XML export. Since DBVersion 4xx/7xx the translatable text lives in dedicated localization sections (*_l10ns), keyed by language, while the structural sections hold identifiers and settings. read_lss() reads every section into a tidy data frame without mutating any user-facing identifier or text. A field that is present but empty (e.g. <help/>) is read as ""; a field that is absent from a row is read as NA.

Examples

# A synthetic four-language demo survey ships with the package.
demo <- system.file("extdata", "demo_survey.lss", package = "lssdoc")
lss <- read_lss(demo)
lss$languages
#> [1] "en" "de" "es" "fr"