John Darrington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 01:33:52PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote: > Jason Stover <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > SPSS has a "text import wizard" that walks the user through the > > process of reading text data. It asks the user questions about > > delimiters and whether variable names are at the top of the file, > > etc., then runs DATA LIST to read the data. This is a good function to > > have: Any frustration at the beginning of learning to use a new > > The version I've got access to runs GET DATA /TYPE=txt.
I don't understand why GET DATA /TYPE=txt even exists. Its features seem equivalent to those in DATA LIST. > Sounds good to me. FYI, I've posted some screenshots of spss' "text > import wizard" at http://darrington.wattle.id.au/SS Thanks! > I don't think that spss makes any attempt to "guess" the format. It > just gathers that information from the user, by asking a series of very > verbose questions. If we can come up with some sort of AI heuristic > to guess the most likely format, then that might pleasantly suprise > some people. So long as there's a GUI widget to easily override the > guess, should it be wrong. Yes, I agree. With a very cursory search, I found one paper on inferring data formats that is almost relevant, and at least interesting: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/papers/Scaffidi2007Topei.pdf I'll follow up on some of the related work and see what I can come up with. -- Ben Pfaff http://benpfaff.org _______________________________________________ pspp-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev
