[Rd] spss long labels

[Martin Maechler]

Hi Kurt,

>>>>> "KVD" == Kurt Van Dijck <kurt.van.dijck at skynet.be>
>>>>>     on Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:05:39 +0200 writes:

    KVD> Hi all, I got no feedback at all concerning the merge
    KVD> of this patch in the source tree.  Am I supposed to do
    KVD> this myself? How should I do this (do I have subversion
    KVD> commit access)? Is this patch acceptable at all? Is it
    KVD> being tested?

I don't know if it's being tested.
It's vacation and traveling time, also for the R core team.

The foreign package source is kept in svn-archive
  https://svn.r-project.org/R-packages/trunk/foreign/

and I have tried to apply your patch (from July 2) to the
sources but 

    patch -p0 < K_Van_Dijck_patch 

    patching file src/sfm-read.c
    Hunk #1 FAILED at 188.
    Hunk #2 FAILED at 420.
    Hunk #3 FAILED at 590.
    Hunk #4 FAILED at 1559.
    4 out of 4 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file src/sfm-read.c.rej
    patching file src/var.h.in
    Hunk #1 FAILED at 41.
    Hunk #2 FAILED at 232.
    Hunk #3 FAILED at 306.
    Hunk #4 FAILED at 377.
    4 out of 4 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file src/var.h.in.rej


Could you provide a patch against the development code from the
above url ?
(after installing 'subversion', you get the development directory by
   svn co https://svn.r-project.org/R-packages/trunk/foreign/
)

    KVD> I got some personal reactions on my post, proving there
    KVD> is general interest in getting rid of the inconvenience
    KVD> of importing long labels from SPSS files.

My problem is that I cannot do much testing apart from the tests
already present in foreign/tests/spss.R

Could you provide a new small *.sav file and a corresponding
read.spss() call which exhibits the
problems and is fixed by your patch?

Thank you in advance for your contribution!
Best regards,

Martin Maechler,
ETH Zurich and R Core Team.


    KVD> Kurt Van Dijck wrote:
    >> Hi,
    >> 
    >> A frequently seen issue with importing SPSS data files,
    >> is that R does not import the 'long variable names'.  I
    >> built a patch on the R-project's foreign module, in order
    >> to import the 'long variable names' from SPSS (record 7,
    >> subtype 13).  To complete the job, I had to expand the
    >> "struct variable" definition to have 64 +1
    >> charachters. I'm not aware of side effects.  The
    >> sfm-read.c code works fine.  I didn't test a variety of
    >> platforms, as I don't have an idea of what is regarded as
    >> sufficient testing. Anyway, I don't expect major troubles
    >> there (no byteswapping problems, no 32<->64 bit issues)
    >> as it's mainly character processing.  The patch is
    >> relative to the foreign directory. It was created against
    >> the trunk of R-project yesterday.
    >> 
    >> We would appreciate that you import such patch into the
    >> main tree.
    >> 
    >> Kind regards,
    >> 
    >> Kurt Van Dijck (C programmer) & Ilse Laurijssen (R user)
    >> Belgium

    [......... patch deleted .............]