[Rd] (PR#9896) read.spss converts string variables with

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Wed Sep 5 19:01:43 CEST 2007


Thank you.

If anyone wants to work on a patch I've put the unencoded files from my 
direct copy at

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/problem_file.sav
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/problem_file_read.RData

I am afraid I won't have a chance to take a look for at least a couple of 
weeks.


On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, honza at ifolk.cz wrote:

> ------=_20070905112441_38848
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
> I am sending two files attached. The file problem_file.sav was saved in
> SPSS 10.0. It contains variables of various types, with and without
> labeling etc., so that you can make experiments.
>
> The file problem_file_read.RData was saved in R 2.5.1 (foreign library
> version 0.8-20). It contains two data frames Schools and Schools2. The
> former is result of
> read.spss("problem_file.sav",to.data.frame=TRUE,use.value.labels=TRUE),
> the latter differs in use.value.lables=FALSE only. As you can see, in the
> first case read.spss has not read values of string labeled variables at
> all.
>
> I use WinXP.
>
> Thank you for your work!
>
> Jan Hucin
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Reference: <20070903104656.1D1566691D at slim.kubism.ku.dk>
>
> There is nothing we can do to reproduce this without an example 'some.sav'
> file exhibiting the problem.  Can you please supply one?
>
> On Mon, 3 Sep 2007, honza at ifolk.cz wrote:
>
>> Full_Name: Jan Hucin
>> Version: 2.5.1 (foreign 0.8-20)
>> OS: WinXP
>> Submission from: (NULL) (195.113.83.7)
>>
>>
>> When reading an SPSS file:
>>
>> - containing some variable of type String
>> - with value labels at that variable
>> - and with determination which values of that variable are considered to be
>> missing,
>>
>> I have always get <NA> where digits were in the original SPSS file.
>>
>> Example:
>> Let's have in an SPSS file "some.sav" the variable A. The type of the
> variable
>> is String of length 1.
>> Let's have a value labeling: 1 = Yes, 2 = No, 8 = Invalid, 9 = Missing.
>> Let's determine that value 9 is considered to be missing.
>> When this file is read by
> abc=read.spss("some.sav",use.value.labels=TRUE), we
>> get <NA> in abc$A on places where "1", "2" etc. were. Surprisingly, we
> get "N/A"
>> (not <NA>!) on the place where the string "N/A" is.
>>
>> If we specify use.value.labels=FALSE, then we get string values (such as
> "1",
>> "2") but we lose value labels (Yes, No etc.).
>>
>> Let me add that if the variable in the original SPSS file was of type
> Numeric
>> (not String), there would be no problem.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



More information about the R-devel mailing list