Re: even more about character encoding names

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 01:59:05PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     I had been under the impression, from previous discussions, that
     the string in .sav file record 7, subtype 20
     (e.g. "windows-1252") provided additional important information
     on top of what was in the code page number in record 7 subtype 3
     (e.g. 1252).
     
     But now that I go through my trove of .sav files that I have
     found around the Internet, I can only find one where this is the
     case.  That one is one written by PSPP itself (version
     0.7.4-g44daa4)!  In all the others, the encoding string just
     repeats what we already know from the code page number.
     
     Have you seen any .sav files where the character encoding name
     provides more information than the codepage number?
     
Based on discussions I've had with SPSS users it seems that the datum provided
by 7.3 determines the encoding for strings in the dictionary (ie, Variable 
names, variable
labels, value label keys AND value label values), whereas the string provided
by 7.20 determines the encoding of string data in the file records.  At least 
this is
what recent SPSS versions appear to do.

Now I have never seen a system file generated by a recent SPSS where the two 
data
did not correspond.  However, when I crafted such a file and asked my friendly 
SPSS
user to run it, they reported inconsistencies in the way strings (especially 
value label keys)
were displayed.

J'

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