read.spss, locale and encodings
Hans Ekbrand wrote:
I must be missing something obvious here: According to the help page for read.spss, the reencode option is only active when R is run under a UTF-8 locale.
Not in my version:
reencode: logical: should character strings be re-encoded to the
current locale. The default, 'NA', means to do so in a UTF-8
locale, only. Alternatively character, specifying an
encoding to assume.
read.spss can only import the SPSS file when run under a iso88591(5)
locale, under a UTF-8 locale I get:
Error in read.spss("wo.sav") : error reading system-file header
In addition: Warning message:
In read.spss("wo.sav") :
wo.sav: position 143: Variable name begins with invalid character
So, does it help with reencode="Latin1"? Presumably this comes from assuming UTF-8 when it isn't.
This is under Debian GNU/Linux, the stable release. foreign is version 8.27
8.34 is used in the current prerelease. AFAIR, some issues with encodings were fixed recently.
O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard ?ster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907