foreign(read.spss) in rw2000 and re2001beta

Thomas Lumley <tlumley@u.washington.edu> writes:

I have modified read.spss (but not committed the changes yet)  so that
it does not create a factor when there are missing levels.

Hmm, could we handle this more elegantly? At the very least, we should
probably try to keep the labels as an attribute, so that you have the
option of doing something constructive with them afterwards.

They are kept as an attribute if use.value.labels=TRUE, whether or not a 
factor is created. I had thought they were always kept as an attribute 
even if use.value.labels=FALSE (as happens with read.dta), but this turns 
out not to be the case. This is easily fixed, and I will do so.


I have thought about a class that would make sense for data with some 
values labelled but not all. This is related to some other data 
representation issues that a colleague is asking about, and we may come up 
with a reasonably elegant and general solution.

 	-thomas