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Re: Count system missing columns
From: |
Ben Pfaff |
Subject: |
Re: Count system missing columns |
Date: |
Tue, 22 Dec 2015 16:53:04 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12) |
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 01:15:30AM +0100, John Darrington wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 03:53:58PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 04:42:24PM -0600, Alan Mead wrote:
> > On 12/21/2015 4:10 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> > > I think that you just want: COUNT n=ALL(SYSMIS).
> >
> > Brilliant! But it doesn't wok. On my datafiles, I get a long list of
> > errors like: "V1 and V8 are not of the same type. All variables in
> > this variable list must be of the same type. V8 will be omitted from
> the
> > list." (where, indeed, V1 and V8 are string variables of different
> lengths).
> >
> > Finally, it complains that SYSMIS isn't a string and fails to execute
> > the COUNT: "error: COUNT: Syntax error at `missing': expecting
> string."
> > This happens whether I use MISSING or SYSMIS.
> >
> > I thought that the above was a bug, and maybe it is, because I should
> be
> > able to use SYSMIS/MISSING but it works fine when I specify the columns
> > to use, so I think it only fails when I specify ALL as the columns.
> >
> > BTW, it would be neat if this worked in PSPP, but SPSS refuses to
> accept
> > ALL as a column range.
>
> Hmm.
>
> We could make COUNT accept this, or at least give better error
> messages. But it still won't work any better with SPSS.
>
> In the end, the SPSS language isn't very good at this kind of thing.
>
> My first idea to work around this was to use RECODE. But it seems that
> RECODE also cannot deal with heterogenous variable types.
> I think it would be good to have a wishlist item to allow COUNT and RECODE
> to do that.
For COUNT, only "MISSING" can be used for both numeric and string
variables, so I think the utility of this feature would be limited.