[R] Can I make spss.get reencode from Windows-1252?

Dan Delaney
Sat, 08 Sep 2012 03:17:09 -0000

Hi all. I have an SPSS file that I'm loading into R with the Hmisc spss.get
function. The trouble is that the SPSS file uses the Windows-1252 character set
(which I think is the default for SPSS on Windows) instead of plain-ol'
Latin-1, and since spss.get doesn't allow me to pass the
"reencode" option to read.spss, any characters in Windows-1252 that
are not a part of Latin-1 (such as curly quotes, en-dashes, and a handful of
others) come into R looking like this: "Don\x92t know". Now if I read
that SPSS file in with read.spss and include
"reencode='Windows-1252'", those characters convert to UTF-8
just fine, yielding "Don?t know". But then, of cource, I don't get
the niceties of spss.get, such as the "labels" attributes on the
columns.

So my question is, how can I either pass the
"reencode='Windows-1252'" option through to read.spss, or how
can I make spss.get default to reencoding from Windows-1252 instead of Latin-1?

Thanks
?Dan