R help - Oct 2008 - How do one suggest a patch for the Foreign package

Hi I believe I have long time solution to the problems with the 
read.spss() funtion.

In non-ascii locales the import of spss files into R  has consistently 
   produced errors and sometimes wouldn't allow import at all.

I've made a custom version of the read.spss() function that appear to 
solve the problem for good. I may of course be wrong here.

I believe the problem is that read.spss() tries to guess the codepage of 
the incoming spss file. In some (many?) non-ascii locales it mostly gets 
it wrong. The simple solution is to give the user the option to 
specifically tell read.spss() which codepage to expect and which 
codepage to translate to.

In answer to your subject heading question:  to suggest a patch, send an 
email to the package maintainer (as listed in the DESCRIPTION file).  
Your suggestion will get a better reception if you offer sample 
code/data to illustrate the problem, and a nicely written patch to the 
sources to fix it.  (From your description below, it sounds as though
you want to change the args to a function, so you'll need to patch the 
.Rd file for that function too.)

Pay attention to the effect of your changes on existing code.  Code that 
works now should not be broken by your change if it is at all possible 
to avoid that.

Duncan Murdoch

fsando wrote:
> Hi I believe I have long time solution to the problems with the 
> read.spss() funtion.
>
> In non-ascii locales the import of spss files into R  has consistently 
>    produced errors and sometimes wouldn't allow import at all.
>
> I've made a custom version of the read.spss() function that appear to 
> solve the problem for good. I may of course be wrong here.
>
> I believe the problem is that read.spss() tries to guess the codepage of 
> the incoming spss file. In some (many?) non-ascii locales it mostly gets 
> it wrong. The simple solution is to give the user the option to 
> specifically tell read.spss() which codepage to expect and which 
> codepage to translate to.
>
>
>   
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