[R] SPSS to R conversion "error in iconv..."

[Prof Brian Ripley]

It looks like your SPSS file is of a format unknown to the writers of
read.spss, but add argument reencode=FALSE to ignore the encoding
specified

The error is the direct result of the warning: it seems not to be a valid 
codepage in your iconv.

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Maria Gouskova wrote:

> Dear R users,
>
> I am trying to get R to read an .sav data file generated in SPSS 17
> for Mac. Here is the command and the error message:
>
>> data = read.spss('/Users/userdir/Desktop/filename.sav')
>
> Error in iconv(names(rval), cp, "") : unsupported conversion
> In addition: Warning message:
> In read.spss("/Users/userdir/Desktop/filename.sav") :
>  /Users/userdir/Desktop/filename.sav: File-indicated character
> representation code (28591) looks like a Windows codepage
>
> I understand the source of the Warning message and am not too
> concerned about this, but I could not find any information about this
> particular Error message. Does anyone have suggestions or know how to
> get around this?
>
> This is in R 2.7.2, R.app GUI 1.25. Any help would be appreciated--I
> am an R newbie.
>
> Maria
>
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595