Re: sav files with attributes

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 10:44:37AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     SPSS 14 added the DATAFILE ATTRIBUTE and VARIABLE ATTRIBUTE
     commands, which added two new extension records (subtypes 17 and
     18) to the .sav file format.  My current idea for the new output
     subsystem involves metadata added via these attributes, so as a
     first step I'm adding support for attributes to PSPP.  This
     should not be hard.  But so far, I've only been able to find 3
     .sav files in the wild (via web searches) that have attributes in
     them.  Do you have any around?
     
     If you don't have any, but do have a copy of SPSS to experiment
     with, I would like to look at a .sav file that contains
     attributes that have the following in them: double quotes ("),
     unbalanced single quotes ('), and line feeds.  I think that the
     following syntax would be sufficient:
     
     DATA LIST /dummy 1.
     BEGIN DATA.
     1
     END DATA.
     DATAFILE ATTRIBUTE
       ATTRIBUTE=dquote1('"x"')
                 dquote2('"y')
                 squote1("'x'"),
                 squote2("'y"),
                 linefeed(X'4142430A444546').
     SAVE OUTFILE='x.sav'.


Spss doesn't like the line beginning "linefeed...", but if I delete
that, then that syntax is accepted ok.

Here's a tarball containing some of the experiments I tried.
Hopefully you can work out what I did.

J'


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