Hi All.
The major problem with the SPSS export is choosing a delimiter that :
a) Does not have a multi-byte UTF-8 encoding (it must be a regular ASCII character, eg. ¤ or does NOT work) b) It must be a character the normally is not used in text entry (or as separator for date, time, etc.)
In regards to b) the main issue is that the delimiter cannot be part of the data, not even if it is enclosed in quotations. Since a text field in EpiData may contain ANY kind of data (that includes all visible UTF-8 characters), I chose the vertical bar "|" to be the on LEAST likely to be used as part of a text field.
I know this is not a perfect solution, but in all fairness I consider the SPSS import to very buggy considering that not even text in quotations can contain the delimiter.
Regards, Torsten Bonde Christiansen. EpiData Association.
On 2013-10-26 02:27, epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca wrote:
It might be useful to have an option in Manager to specify the delimiter, rather than force the use of a vertical bar. While this might seem to be a character that would never be used, it could be entered by mistake in a text field. This would be easy for an experienced SPSS user to track down, but an annoyance to the more casual user. <tab> as a delimiter would make sense, but that would make editing the .txt data file problematic. Jamie
On Oct 25, 2013, at 3:54 PM, epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca wrote:
It would be good to know if the other SPSS users having problems with previous versions still have problems.
The data list command format in the sps file now looks like this: DATA LIST FILE = "/home/jens/data/bromar.1.3.txt" ENCODING="UTF8" FREE ("|") RECORDS = 1 / _DoubleEntry(F1) id(F4) sex(F1) error(F1) km(F3) kmgrp(F1) age(F2) agegrp(F2) dectime(F6.4) decgrp(F1) runok(F1) .
for the example bromar file. Notice, that the {} are no longer there.
regards Jens Lauritsen EpiData Association
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