Starting with version 16, SPSS provides full Unicode support. Prior versions use only code page character sets. That means that you are limited to one character set at a time, so unless your four languages all use the same code page, you can't work with them in a single dataset unless you have a newer version.

There are two Chinese code pages (traditional (Taiwan) and simplified (PRC). These code pages accommodate plain roman characters but not accented characters nor other Asian character sets (Korean, Japanese, ...).

If you can't upgrade, the only choice would be to partition the data and work with each character set separately if you need to preserve the text. If you do that, be sure to set the SPSS locale to match and change the font appropriately for each.

HTH,

Jon Peck

From: SPSSX(r) Discussion [mailto:SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Mario Giesel Sent: Monday, September 07, 2009 7:22 AM To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: [SPSSX-L] Importing UTF-8 into SPSS

Hello, newsgroup,

we struggle with a problem reading text data (UTF-8 format) into SPSS and keeping the respective language characters (4 languages including chinese). External data are Excel or maybe xml format. We've got SPSS 15. Who can help?

Thanks a lot,

Mario