I have a many SPSS files that have value labels defined for the variables. I'm looking for the best way to list this value-label pairs out in plain text -- sort of a reverse of the syntax
VARIABLE LABEL "This is a fine variable".
VALUE LABEL var1
0 "label for 0"
1 "label for 1"
2 "label for 2"
.
Target:
var1 "This is a fine variable" 0="label for 0", 1="label for 1", 2="label for 2"
Right now, I can see that DISPLAY DICTIONARY will output a section that has these in a table. Unfortunately, it doesn't attach the variable labels with the value labels. Does anyone have workaround to merge the two tables or even output plain text with a single line per variable that has both the variable label and value labels?
Thanks,
pT
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Saving to .por is an option that I'd never have come up with! It does take some parsing, but the variables are listed (although they revert to 8 character versions) like
/70/[length of variable name]/[VARIABLE NAME][type]/[width]/[decim
later on, the labels start with:
D[number of variables in list using the same value labels]{/[length of var name]/[var name]}[number of labeled values]/{[value1]/[length of value label1 text]/[value label1 text]}
where {} represent repeating parts for lists (not included in text file) and the lengths are given in base 36(?), i.e.
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,
This will really get me going (as you can see!) Thanks!
pT
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by: richdiesalPosted on 2009-06-16 at 11:13:29ID: 24640685
As far as I know, there's no way to merge tables automatically. Even by hand, it's a little tricky. However, I'm wondering if you could simply turn on double labels - in Options under the Edit menu, select the Output Labels tab and select "Values and Labels" wherever you can set that option. That _should_ add the output you want to the DISPLAY DICTIONARY command that you're using (emphasis on should).
If that doesn't work, plain text output is much trickier. There's no way to simply output the labels, as far as I know, but if you're willing to do a little text parsing, you'd probably be able to extract them from an SPSS Portable file, which saves all of the SPSS info in plain text. Just go to File/Save As and select SPSS Portable. Open that file in a text editor, and you'll see the labels you are interested in embedded somewhere toward the end. I've never been able to make sense of their ASCII codes, but perhaps you'll have better luck...