[R] SPSS dictionary information data bases

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, SUBIRANA CACHINERO, ISAAC wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Does anybody know how to obtain the same information as the SPSS command
> "DISPLAY DICTIONARY".
> I know the read.spss function in the package foreign, but it doesn't
> give either the missing values defined by the user under SPSS or the
> format variables (for example if they are dates or not).
>

Both PSPP (at gnu.org) and an SPSS website whose address I have somewhere 
give C code for reading this information.  The limitation is finding 
someone who knows C, cares about SPSS data dictionaries, and has the time 
to integrate the code into read.spss and test the results. [Testing is not 
trivial, since we have big-endian and little-endian machines and a range 
of versions of SPSS to worry about]

I added variable label and value label reading to read.spss, but I don't 
have any plans to do more in the foreseeable future.

 	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle