[R] Can I make spss.get reencode from Windows-1252?

[Dan Delaney]

Hi all. I have an SPSS file that I'm loading into R with the Hmisc spss.get function. The trouble is that the SPSS file uses the Windows-1252 character set (which I think is the default for SPSS on Windows) instead of plain-ol' Latin-1, and since spss.get doesn't allow me to pass the "reencode" option to read.spss, any characters in Windows-1252 that are not a part of Latin-1 (such as curly quotes, en-dashes, and a handful of others) come into R looking like this: "Don\x92t know". Now if I read that SPSS file in with read.spss and include "reencode='Windows-1252'", those characters convert to UTF-8 just fine, yielding "Don’t know". But then, of cource, I don't get the niceties of spss.get, such as the "labels" attributes on the columns.

So my question is, how can I either pass the "reencode='Windows-1252'" option through to read.spss, or how can I make spss.get default to reencoding from Windows-1252 instead of Latin-1?

Thanks
—Dan