David Baird has created a free data conversion utility called dataload. See
http://www.vsn-intl.com/genstat/downloads/dataload.htm It can translate SPSS files into other formats including several that are readable by R (including csv and rda). I don't use SPSS myself but I have used dataload succesfully with Excel files. (This is the same utility that was mentioned on the list recently in connection with SAS.) --- Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 15:58:02 -0800 (PST) From: Jacob Wegelin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [R] read.spss Error reading system-file header Is there any documentation on what kind of SPSS file can and cannot be read by read.spss? Alternatively, how can one modify or "clean" an SPSS file to make it readable by read.spss? What properties must a *.sav file before read.spss can read it? The file in this example is 270KB, with 5 rows and 173 columns. I have no trouble reading larger files with read.spss, so it's not merely a size problem. I have no difficulty opening the file in SPSS. I also have no trouble getting read.spss to read a dummy SPSS file with 5 rows and 173 columns, where each entry was randomly sampled from c(letters, LETTERS). > library("foreign") > junk<-read.spss("indata/z2EXvideo.sav") Error in read.spss("indata/z2EXvideo.sav") : Error reading system-file header. In addition: Warning message: indata/z2EXvideo.sav: File layout code has unexpected value 50331648. Value should be 2, in big-endian or little-endian format. Thanks for any information Jake Wegelin > version _ platform i386-pc-mingw32 arch i386 os mingw32 system i386, mingw32 status major 1 minor 8.0 year 2003 month 10 day 08 language R _______________________________________________ No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding. Introducing My Way - http://www.myway.com ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help