Thanks to Brian Ripley, Douglas Bates and Thomas Petzoldt for their comments.
I agree that it is not really a problem, as you can easily use sub() after read.spss() to get rid of the blanks (I had already done that). On the other hand, it might be important to _know_ about the fact that characters are filled with blanks here. [I noticed it because I used a character variable as the common column in a merge(tab1,tab2,by=XCHAR), where tab1 came into R from an SPSS file using read.spss(), and tab2 came into R from an Excel file via odbc using odbcConnectExcel(). The merge failed on some cases, because some values of XCHAR from tab1 had trailing blanks, the values of tab2 had none.] I know now, so I know what to do in future cases. But as not everybody else might be aware of this, my suggestion would be that it could be worth adding a short comment about this in help(read.spss), so noone will be "surprised". Regards, Heinrich. > -----Urspr�ngliche Nachricht----- > Von: RINNER Heinrich [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Gesendet: Mittwoch, 27. August 2003 18:06 > An: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' > Betreff: [R] read.spss (package foreign) and character columns > > > Dear R users! > > I am using R Version 1.7.1, Windows XP, package "foreign" > (Version: 0.6-1), > SPSS 11.5.1. > > There is one thing I noticed with "read.spss", and I'd like > to ask if this > is considered to be a feature, or possibly a bug: > When reading character columns, character strings seem to get > filled with > blanks at the end. > > Simple example: > In SPSS, create a file with one variable called "xchar" of type "A5" > (character of length 5), and 3 values ("a", "ab", "abcde"), > save it as > "test.sav". > > In R: > > library(foreign) > > test <- read.spss("test.sav", to.data.frame=T) > > test > XCHAR > 1 a > 2 ab > 3 abcde > > levels(test$XCHAR) > [1] "a " "ab " "abcde" > > Shouldn't it rather be "a" "ab" "abcde" (no blanks)? > > -Heinrich. > > ______________________________________________ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
