Hi, It works for me to import spss datasets via library(foreign) with read.spss or via library Hmisc by (spss.get). But no matter which way I do import the data, user-defined missings from Spss are always lost. (it makes no difference if there are a single value, a range, or any combination of them. They are always ignored). Is there any way in R to find out if any value was user-defined missing in Spss or not? Even to keep the information as an attribute would suit me fine, or to keep them as a string character like "miss" would be even better. To transform them into "NA" as the sysmis data from Spss is transformed automatically, would be an other alternative.
Unfortunately I don't know if any of these options are possible. Could you help me out? Let me give you an example: Preconditions: You need to have spss on you computer to generate the spss data. You need to generate the folder C:/tmp to save the spss file. As you can see I work with windows. */1) Generate the SpssData: */data. DATA LIST LIST /age (f2) sport (f2). BEGIN DATA 22, 1 40, 2 69, 1 19, 2 -99, 9 END DATA. */description. missing values age (LO thru 0). missing values sport (9). var label age "age". var label sport "Do you like sports" value label sport 1 "yes" 2 "no" 3 "don't know". *frequencies in Spss. freq age sport. save outfile = "C:\tmp\test.sav". *-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------. 2) Import the Spss Data in R. Via Hmisc or foreign - both work fine. #import Spssdata in R spssfile <- "C:/tmp/test.sav" #via Hmisc library(Hmisc) Signs <- c("_") mydata1 <- spss.get(spssfile,lowernames=TRUE, allow=Signs) #via foreign library(foreign) mydata2 <- read.spss(spssfile,use.value.labels=TRUE, max.value.labels=Inf, to.data.frame=TRUE) #freq in r describe(mydata1) describe(mydata2) *-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------. Have a look at the two variables age and sport. In spss the values (-99) in age is a missing, as well as the value (9) in sports. As you can see - the information about the missings in R is lost. What can I do? Many Thanks Christine Christmann ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.