R help - Apr 2009 - read.spss, locale and encodings

I must be missing something obvious here:

According to the help page for read.spss, the reencode option is only
active when R is run under a UTF-8 locale.

read.spss can only import the SPSS file when run under a iso88591(5)
locale, under a UTF-8 locale I get:

Error in read.spss("wo.sav") : error reading system-file header
In addition: Warning message:
In read.spss("wo.sav") :
  wo.sav: position 143: Variable name begins with invalid character

This is under Debian GNU/Linux, the stable release.

foreign is version 8.27

-- 
Hans Ekbrand (http://sociologi.cjb.net) <hans at sociologi.cjb.net>
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Hans Ekbrand wrote:
> I must be missing something obvious here:
> 
> According to the help page for read.spss, the reencode option is only
> active when R is run under a UTF-8 locale.
Not in my version:

reencode: logical: should character strings be re-encoded to the
           current locale.  The default, 'NA', means to do so in a UTF-8
           locale, only.  Alternatively character, specifying an
           encoding to assume.

> 
> read.spss can only import the SPSS file when run under a iso88591(5)
> locale, under a UTF-8 locale I get:
> 
> Error in read.spss("wo.sav") : error reading system-file header
> In addition: Warning message:
> In read.spss("wo.sav") :
>   wo.sav: position 143: Variable name begins with invalid character
So, does it help with reencode="Latin1"? Presumably this comes from 
assuming UTF-8 when it isn't.
> This is under Debian GNU/Linux, the stable release.
> 
> foreign is version 8.27
8.34 is used in the current prerelease. AFAIR, some issues with 
encodings were fixed recently.

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