R help - Dec 2003 - read.spss warning message with 12.0 sav files

useRs,

Don't know if this requires a bug report, but
using the read.spss function on files written by the 
new SPSS 12.0 produces the following warning message:

Warning message: 
C:\data\spss.sav: Unrecognized record type 7, subtype 13 encountered in
system file. 

The data files appear to be read correctly. The warning likely results 
from changes to the file format due to SPSS increasing the size of 
variable names from 8 characters to 64. 

Harold Baize
Butte County Department of Behavioral Health

As a follow up to my last posting. The read.spss 
function returns variable names truncated to 
eight characters when reading a SPSS 12.0 sav 
file with long variable names. 

The read.spss function adds ".A", ".B", etc. 
to each additional variable with the same 
first eight characters in the name. A viable 
solution, but keeping the full name would be 
a nice improvement for an updated function. 
IMHO.

Harold Baize
Butte County Department of Behavioral Health