First of all, apologies if you feel misquoted, I was only trying to keep things clear. Now, I have installed and tried the new version of the package and it works perfectly. It does exactly what it should do. I tested it on some huge SPSS's sample files which contained a lot of variables with several types of missingness, and all missing values were correctly converted to R <NA> values. I find this a very big improvement, and it makes the transition from spss to R even easier. Thank you very much!
Prof Brian Ripley wrote: > > 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 I am sorry you are right here, I was using an outdated version of 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 > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/importing-explicitly-declared-missing-values-in-read.spss-%28foreign%29-tp18776776p18829484.html Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
