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spss-data import

2 messages · Bernd Weiss, Peter Malewski

Original
Bernd Weiss
# 
Hello,

at the moment i am using spss as my favorite statistics 
package, but R seems an atractive alternative. Thanks to 
the R-Team for their great work! (I use R on my windows98 
laptop,P II and 64MB Ram).

I have a big(?) data set, containing more than 470 
variables and 3200 cases (size: 2.5MB). Whenever I use the 
command 'read.spss' (foreign-library), I got the the 
following warning massages: 
------------------
Warning messages: 
1: d:/s3000.sav: File contains duplicate label for value 
0.5 for variable V50. 
2: d:/s3000.sav: File contains duplicate label for value 1 
for variable V50. 
3: d:/s3000.sav: File contains duplicate label for value 
0.5 for variable V63. 
4: d:/s3000.sav: File contains duplicate label for value 1 
for variable V63. 
[...]
------------------
How do I interpret these warnings?

My next step was trying to save the spss-data as an ascii-
file (separated by tabs) and using the R command 
'read.table' -- R crashes. 

My third step was saving the spss-data as an ascii-file (in 
fixed format) and using again 'read.table'. I got:
------------------
Error in read.table("d:/fixed.dat", header = T) : 
        all rows must have the same length.
------------------

What went wrong? 

TIA

Bernd  


--
Bernd Wei? (bernd.weiss at epost.de)
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Peter Malewski
#
On Sat, Jun 09, 2001 at 03:57:29PM +0200, Bernd Weiss wrote:
Look at your exported data-file an you'll see how you have to read
it. My standard way to read excel csv files is:

Akten1998.1 <- read.csv("File.csv",sep=";",as.is=T,dec=",")

But this depends on several cirumstances. E.g. on some windows
platforms the "dec" is set to "." (I think you can set this with spss). 

Spss often uses tabs as seperators (depends how you export your file 
in spss) so 

sep="\t"

should work.

My experience with read.spss:

1. Works often with spss version 6-9...
2. ...mut sometimes crash with these files (I have at least one file
that is not readable).
3. Don't work with spss version 10 files. Even spss 6 cannot read
them. 

So: 
while (!success)
	exoport from spss with other options
	look at the file
	specify read.xxx parameter

Peter