[R] read.spss, locale and encodings

[Peter Dalgaard]

Hans Ekbrand wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 04:17:51PM +0200, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
>> Hans Ekbrand wrote:
>>> Someone running foreign 8.34 that is willing to test my SPSS-file?
>> Someone with an SPSS file problem willing to help test the prereleases? :-)
> 
> http://sociologi.cjb.net/temp/test.sav

No joy.

 > read.spss("~/Desktop/downloads/test.sav", reencode = "latin1")
Error in read.spss("~/Desktop/downloads/test.sav", reencode = "latin1") :
   error reading system-file header
In addition: Warning message:
In read.spss("~/Desktop/downloads/test.sav", reencode = "latin1") :
   ~/Desktop/downloads/test.sav: position 143: Variable name begins with 
invalid character

(I suppose the actual culprit could be number 144 which does indeed 
start with an A-ring ("ÅLDKAT"))

Apparently, you can work around it like this

lc <- Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE")
Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", "da_DK")
x <- read.spss("~/Desktop/downloads/test.sav", reencode = "latin1")
Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", lc)

-- which doesn't strike me as particularly logical, but whatever works....

-- 
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