Control encoding when parsing SPSS file using spss.system.file()

[melff]

Control encoding when parsing SPSS file using spss.system.file()

[melff]

Dear Thomas,

spss.system.file() reads strings contained in SPSS files as-is, without any translation. The resulting strings therefore do not contain any encoding information. My guess is that this is why you see that strange output. So far, I did not encounter a problem like the one you describe, since most SPSS files I encountered were in latin1. However, memisc now has a function Iconv() for explicit translation of SPSS data files. Does

library(memisc)
foo <- spss.system.file("foobar.sav")
foo <- Iconv(foo,from="UTF-8",to="UTF-8")

or

foo <- Iconv(foo,from="ASCII",to="UTF-8")

work for you?

Re your PS. That is a bug, fixed in the current GitHub release (0.98).
Best,
Martin

[00tau]

Dear Martin,

thank you for your help and the quick response. The sav-file seems to have been saved using a Latin1 encoding, as the following did indeed work!

> library(memisc)
> foo <- spss.system.file("foobar.sav")
> foo <- Iconv(foo,from="Latin1",to="UTF-8")
> foo <- as.data.frame(as.data.set(foo))
> head(foo$Geschlecht)
[1] weiblich männlich männlich männlich männlich männlich
Levels: männlich weiblich 

All the best,
Thomas