Re: Outputting .sav files

[John Darrington]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 08:25:00AM +0100, Kjetil Wikestad wrote:
     Hi all.
     
     I have installed PSPP 0.6.1 on OpenSUSE, through the OpenSUSE build
     service, and I really like what I see.
     
     But there are a couple of things that I can't get to work:
     
     1) I want to output an .sav  from the command line. Is it possible with
     pspp?
     
     Something like this: pspp  -f output.sav syntax.sps

Well that depends on what "syntax.sps" contains. .sps files and .sav
files are two different things.  A .sps contains commands in the
pspp/spss language, whereas a .sav file contains data upon which
commands can operate.  Part of the language allows for data files to
be generated at run time.   So if "syntax.sps" were to contain
something like:

data list list /id * name (a20).
begin data.
0 fred
1 bert
2 charlie
end data.

save outfile='output.sav'.
execute.

then, on the command line, you could simply enter: "pspp syntax.sps"
to get your output.sav file.

     2) A .sav created in PSPP will not display unicode characters correctly
     in SPSS 16. The same happens in the output window in PSPP. How can I get
     all characters to display correctly?

Well you need to understand exactly what you mean by "unicode
characters" and "correctly".  By default, pspp writes string data in
the encoding of the current locale.  Thus, if your current locale's
encoding is (say) UTF8 and the machine on which you're running spss is
ISO-8859-1, then clearly it's  not going to display "correctly".  So
you have 2 choices: Either change the encoding of the current locale
in which you're running pspp, OR change the encoding of the locale
which spss uses to read the data (use the SET LOCALE command).

I hope this helps.

J'
     
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