Dates in read.spss

Frank E Harrell Jr <fharrell at virginia.edu> writes:

I am using read.spss in the foreign package to read an SPSS save file.  For date variables I get huge values such as 11489990400.  Does anyone know how to convert these values to R POSIXct date objects?  Thanks in advance -Frank

Google is your friend. 3rd item from a search on spss+dates is

Statistical Packages at MIMAS: SPSS - date handling and the Year ...
Conclusions. SPSS stores dates internally as elapsed seconds since 00:00:00
on 14 October 1582, the first allowable date being 15 October 1582.

So who's born Nov.21 1946?

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907