HI!

This mail is related to Thomas mail so I follow up.

I use Greek language and the spss files with value labels containing greek
characters can not be imported with read.spss.

I am on:

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.5.0 Under development (unstable) (2007-02-01 r40632)
i686-pc-linux-gnu

locale:
LC_CTYPE=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_MESSAGES=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_NAME=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_ADDRESS=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_TELEPHONE=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_MEASUREMENT=el_GR.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=el_GR.UTF-8


The following files are small examples used below:
http://users.forthnet.gr/the/isoumpasis/data/1.sav
http://users.forthnet.gr/the/isoumpasis/data/12.sav<http://users.forthnet.gr/the/isoumpasis/data/12.RData>

The first file has english value labels and can be read:
> read.spss("~/Desktop/1.sav")
$VAR1
 [1] "\xf3\xf0\xdf\xf4\xe9     "       "\xf3\xf0\xdf\xf4\xe9     "
 [3] "\xf3\xf0\xdf\xf4\xe9     "       "\xf3\xf0\xdf\xf4\xe9     "
 [5] "\xf3\xf0\xdf\xf4\xe9     "       "\xe3\xf1\xe1\xf6\xe5\xdf\xef   "
 [7] "\xe3\xf1\xe1\xf6\xe5\xdf\xef   " "\xe3\xf1\xe1\xf6\xe5\xdf\xef   "
 [9] "\xe3\xf1\xe1\xf6\xe5\xdf\xef   " "\xf3\xf0\xdf\xf4\xe9     "
[11] "\xe3\xf1\xe1\xf6\xe5\xdf\xef   "

$VAR2
 [1] 5 6 7 7 5 7 3 5 6 7 8

attr(,"label.table ")
attr(,"label.table")$VAR1
NULL

attr(,"label.table")$VAR2
NULL

I can then convert the characters to greek using Thomas' code, so there is
no problem here.

In file 12.sav the value labels are greek. The problem is that the file
cannot be read.

> read.spss("~/Desktop/12.sav")
Error in read.spss("~/Desktop/12.sav") : error reading system-file header
In addition: Warning message:
~/Desktop/12.sav: position 0: Variable name begins with invalid character

I also tried using use.value.labels=FALSE having the same message.

> read.spss("~/Desktop/12.sav", use.value.labels=FALSE)
Error in read.spss("~/Desktop/12.sav", use.value.labels = FALSE) :
    error reading system-file header
In addition: Warning message:
~/Desktop/12.sav: position 0: Variable name begins with invalid character

The encoding of the spss files is windows-1253 (greek). The problem should
be with other non-ascii characters too. Is there any workaround for this?

Thanks in advance
I.Soumpasis

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