Date:         Thu, 19 Dec 2002 15:44:13 -0600
Reply-To:     Carol Albright <calbright@visi.com>
Sender:       "SPSSX(r) Discussion" <SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Carol Albright <calbright@visi.com>
Subject:      Automating Search & Replace within Syntax File - Summary
In-Reply-To:  <995B47168FDCD211A0A7009027457F8408CE35EA@arfems.camh.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hi, Listers,

        Here's my very belated THANKS! to Mahbub Khandoker, Mark Cassaza, & Art
Kendall & all for their ideas.  I had also whined to my husband, who
whipped up a Python script.  If you feed the script a CSV (comma-separated
file) with the old text in the first column, and the new text in the second
column, it will walk through your file, searching for the text in column 1
and replacing with what's in column 2.

        (I realized I couldn't just rename my variables to match my existing
syntax as I need to keep the names between timepoints discrete in order to
do paired t-tests (i.e. compare this question from the pretest to its mate
at follow-up).

        I posted the script, how to use it and a sample run at:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~syzygy/Search_and_Replace_Python_Script.html


Here's a quick summary of editing software or search & replace features
people sent:

Mahbub Khandoker suggested these two:

1)  http://www.htmlworkshop.com/srhtml98.html
2)  http://www.ctssn.com/linux/perlReplacementScript.html

Mark suggested trying these editors:
1) Ultra Edit:  http://www.ultraedit.com/, a text editor, you can record
macros.
2) "Cool Edit"  http://www.syntrillium.com/


(my original problem:
Hi, SPSS Listers!

        Ouch, ouch!  Why do survey researchers rearrange their questions between
the pretest, post-test and followup?  The fastest way I've found to adapt
syntax written for one version, say to compute a new variable or create a
scale, is to make a copy of the original syntax, then use search and replace.

        Over, and over, and over again:  Q23 becomes P15, q24 becomes P16, etc
etc.  Meanwhile my hand goes numb from the repetitive motion.

        Anybody have a program or trick where I could feed the 'program'  two
lists of variable names, and the program successively searches for the
item in List A in my syntax file and replaces that text string with its
counterpart from List B.  I suspect it'd need to be a script or even
non-SPSS.  I'm not script-literate, so didn't know where to start.)

Happy holidays,
Carol
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Carol L. Albright, MS             | E-Mail   : calbright@visi.com
Albright Consulting               | Phone   : 651/699-7218
St. Paul, MN 55105 USA      |  Research data services
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~syzygy
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