I've put up an experimental version at
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/R/foreign_0.8-28.1.tar.gz
See the new 'use.missings' argument. It does what I think should happen
in your example and the other one I tried, but more experience would be
helpful.
On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
Please don't silently excise context -- see the posting guide for the
rights of posters to be quoted fairly (and your usage of my posting fails
to be fair).
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
From the messages you get I do not believe this is a recent version of
read.spss (message 2 no longer appears)...
I am sorry you are right here, I was using an outdated version of foreign. I
have updated my packages. My current version is now R version 2.7.1
(2008-06-23) with foreign_0.8-28.
I have experimented importing some spss datafiles, mostly from the sample
data files that are included with SPSS. Most of these files do not generate
any warnings, so I am not sure this is related to the missingness. However,
the problem of read.spss() not returning any information on missingness
persists in all of these datafiles.
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
All that is 'harmfull' is that you are not told that value labels NA and
NAP were to be regarded as 'missing' in SPSS. We've no idea whether if
would be a more or less egregious choice to map them to R's NA, and
certainly are not in a position to assert 'far less harmfull' in general.
Of course the 'least harmfull' behavior of the function completely depends
on the data and the user's intentions. I was explicitly suggesting making
the mapping of missing values to <NA>'s optional, to give users who consider
this appropriate, the option to replace these missings. I do not claim this
to be the best default behavior, just a very useful feature.
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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