Re: Text Importing

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 01:33:52PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>      Jason Stover <address@hidden> writes:
>      
>      > SPSS has a "text import wizard" that walks the user through the
>      > process of reading text data. It asks the user questions about
>      > delimiters and whether variable names are at the top of the file,
>      > etc., then runs DATA LIST to read the data. This is a good function to
>      > have: Any frustration at the beginning of learning to use a new
>
> The version I've got access to runs GET DATA /TYPE=txt.  

I don't understand why GET DATA /TYPE=txt even exists.  Its
features seem equivalent to those in DATA LIST.

> Sounds good to me.  FYI, I've posted some screenshots of spss' "text
> import wizard" at http://darrington.wattle.id.au/SS

Thanks!

> I don't think that spss makes any attempt to "guess" the format.  It
> just gathers that information from the user, by asking a series of very
> verbose questions.  If we can come up with some sort of AI heuristic
> to guess the most likely format, then that might pleasantly suprise
> some people. So long as there's a GUI widget to easily override the
> guess, should it be wrong.

Yes, I agree.

With a very cursory search, I found one paper on inferring data
formats that is almost relevant, and at least interesting:
        http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/papers/Scaffidi2007Topei.pdf
I'll follow up on some of the related work and see what I can
come up with.
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
http://benpfaff.org