Feature request: support for writing "notes" to .dta files

[mafw]

haven::read_dta has the ability to read “notes” from ".dta" files produced by STATA. haven::write_dta can write .dta files with a "label" attribute for the data set that STATA users can see when they load the data.

It would be great if haven:write_dta could write the value stored in an attribute named "notes" to the .dta file. In Stata, the "notes" attribute can contain more characters than the "label" attribute, so I find it more useful. For example, I would like to include a link to the source of the raw data in a file that contains the processed data.

It appears that this functionality is working in the underlying ReadStat package.

[mafw]

For reference, the functionality was added in the following commit in the ReadStat repo:

44eff95

Documented in this issue:

WizardMac/ReadStat#73

Seems like the function readstat_add_note can be used to add notes to datafiles when saving them. I've tried figuring out how to implement this functionality into the haven package, but since I have no experience with implementing C code in R packages I haven't gotten very far...

Also, a workaround to get save .dta files with notes mentioned in an issue for the ReadStata13 package here:

sjewo/readstata13#77 (comment)

It works when saving .dta files using readstata13::save.dta13, but not haven::write_dta.