Exporting Data to text files with additional comments

[Mario Giesel]

Hello, SPSS friends,

  I'm trying to export *.sav data into tab separated text files.

I did not find a solution via SAVE TRANSLATE or WRITE.

The export includes values of one variable.

Above the values I want to insert comments like in the example below:

[Target Info]
Text1="Male"
Text2="18-65 years"
0
1
0
0
1
0
0
1
0
0
0
1

Any ideas how I can automate this via syntax?

Thanks for any suggestion.

  Mario

[Andy W]

For such a simple example, PRINT would work fine. For more complicated examples (e.g. you want to the file to be csv delimited with quotations for strings etc.) you may need to physically add the header cases into the file (which would require converting the integers to strings) and then export the file using the usual means.

************************************.
DATA LIST FREE / X.
BEGIN DATA
0
1
0
0
1
0
0
1
0
0
0
1
END DATA.
FORMATS X (F1.0).
FILE HANDLE test /NAME = "C:\Users\andrew.wheeler\Documents\SPSSDocs".

DO IF $casenum = 1.
PRINT OUTFILE = "test\Test.txt"
      /'[Target Info]'
      /'Text1="Male"'
      /'Text2="18-65 years"'.
END IF.
PRINT OUTFILE = "test\Test.txt"
      /X.
EXECUTE.
************************************.

[David Marso]

FWIW, to generate a tab, create a variable with the value 8 and format it as PIB.

[Ruben Geert van den Berg]

Dear Mario,

Where do the comment texts come from? Is there any clear structure in them that's related to the data? Is it (theoretically) possible to generate them automatically? How many .txt files do you want to write?

If it concerns many .txt files and there's a fixed structure in the comment texts you could perhaps use Python to generate the text files for you. I did something (reasonably) similar here: http://spss-tutorials.com/downloads/LI-orthoplan_00.sps.

Best,

Ruben