--- Thomas Lumley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 5 Apr 2007, John Kane wrote: > > Heck. I'd be happy to get an answer to what is > > happening here: > >> mac <- spss.get("H:/ONTH/Raw.data/Follow.sav") > > Warning message: > > H:/ONTH/Raw.data/Follow.sav: Unrecognized record > type > > 7, subtype 16 encountered in system file > > > > It means that your file had a record of type 7, > subtype 16 in it, and > read.spss doesn't know how to handle these. > > You would have to ask SPSS what record type 7 and > subtype 16 represent -- > their software put them there, and it's their > terminology. > > People's experience with unrecognised record types > is that they usually > don't matter, which would make sense from a > backwards-compatibility point > of view, but in the absence of documentation or > psychic powers it is hard > to be sure.
Yes, that actually was what I meant. I have had no problems with SPSS 12 but 14 seems a bit nasty. Sometime I may get a change to build a couple of test files in SPSS that I can check. >Avoiding read.spss is a perfectly > reasonable strategy, and is > in fact what we have always recommended in the Data > Import-Export manual. I have simply moved to exporting the SPSS file to a delimited file and loading it. Unfortunately I'm losing all the labelling which can be time-consuming to redo. Some of the data has something like 10 categories for a variable. > > AFAIK the only commercial statistical software > vendor that does provide > complete, public documentation of their file formats > is Stata, and this > is one reason why there are fewer complaints about > read.dta and write.dta. > It also probably helps that the code was written by > someone who uses Stata > -- there hasn't been much contribution of code or > patches for the > foreign package from SPSS users. > > > -thomas > ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.