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

peter dalgaard
Sat, 08 Sep 2012 13:09:49 -0000

On Sep 8, 2012, at 05:17 , Dan Delaney wrote:

> 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?

Would it work to do the conversion afterwards?

> iconv("\x92", from="CP1252")
[1] "?"


--
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com