Date:         Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:52:05 -0400
Reply-To:     Richard Ristow <wrristow@mindspring.com>
Sender:       "SPSSX(r) Discussion" <SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Richard Ristow <wrristow@mindspring.com>
Subject:      Re: Display dictionary
Comments: To: Patricia.Cleland@edu.gov.on.ca
In-Reply-To:  <72A5DBEDEA97FA4A939074F676F6198B0191C0FD@cscptomomxis001.c
              sc.ad.gov.on.ca>
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At 11:28 AM 6/17/2005, Patricia  Cleland wrote:

>In the past SPSS printed out the dictionary information in a single
>output, that is with all the variable information (var name, var
>label, position, format, width, value labels).
>
>I've just downloaded the demo of V13, and DISPLAY DICTIONARY generates
>two tables, one with the variable information and one with the value
>labels.  Is there are way to get all the information in one table?

I haven't had a chance to try it, but there's Scott Czepiel's Perl
utility for extracting SPSS dictionary information from a .SAV file:
sSee posting "Fwd: Extract metadata from SPSS SAV files using Perl",
Fri, 17 Jun 2005 09:38:26. I'd be interested to see how well it works.

SPSS has been, well, pretty awful about giving program access to the
data dictionary. Good old SAS's PROC CONTENTS can give you the whole
dictionary as a SAS dataset (equivalent to a .SAV file), and you can
manipulate it, print it, generate code from it, as you like. I
understand that the current advice for SPSS is to use OMS to direct
DISPLAY DICTIONARY output to an appropriate file to be read back in. It
seems like the long way around. (But, by the way, has anybody made THIS
work?)