[R] SPSS import problem

K. Elo maillists at nic.fi
Wed Mar 12 19:59:24 CET 2008


Hi again,

many thanks for Your answers. So, if I understood Wei right:

Zhao, Wei (Cancer Center) wrote (12.3.2008):
> I had a similar problem when read one of my spss.sav with long
> variable label. But when I read another spss.sav with short label the
> same way, I don't have problem.
> Seems like R only allows variable labels of lengths 1...255 as your
> error message showed.

Searching (in SPSS) all variable labels of length > 255 and coercing 
them to the length of 255 should solve the problem.

@Brian, who wrote:
> read.spss() is not targetted at such a recent version of SPSS, and
> only allows variable labels of lengths 1...255.

I can save the data in SPSS ver 7 -format, too. Is this version 
supported by the import function?

However, the error message "error reading system-file header" gives the 
impression that the problem is somewhere else than in the overlength 
labels. Or have I understood something wrong?

Unfortunately, I cannot make the whole data file available. I could make 
a snapshot resulting in the same error - would that be helpful?

Kind regards,
Kimmo



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