[R] read.spss and umlaut
Thomas Lumley
tlumley at u.washington.edu
Thu Aug 3 18:53:07 CEST 2006
I have gone and looked at the code for reading SPSS portable files, and
the file format appears to specify that you cannot read many legal
characters.
Part of the header information in the file format is a 256-byte
translation table apparently designed for translating between character
representations. It can mark characters as "untranslateable", and the
code for reading character strings replaces untranslateable characters
with NULs.
In the example file in the foreign package the only translatable
characters are the ASCII alphanumeric characters and
.<(+0&[]!$*);^-/|,%_>?`:#@'="~{}\
So, it looks as though your SPSS portable file may be marking character
code FC as untranslatable. This is easy to check -- look at the start of
the file and find the sequence ABCDEF..., which is in the middle of the
translation table. See if u-umlaut is in the table. It might even work to
modify the translation table to allow the accented characters.
It looks as though SPSS .sav files don't have this limitation.
-thomas
Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle
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