SPSSX Discussion

merging files

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taelee

merging files

Hello,
I'm trying to merge two files (A and B). File A has 5000 cases (id, v1, v2) and File B has 4000 cases (id, v2, v3, v4). Is there a way to merge these two files so that it has all 5000 cases with id, v1-v4? Thank you in advance.
Tae

Bruce Weaver

Re: merging files

Administrator

See the intermediate data management tutorials here:

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/topics/data_management.htm

taelee wrote

Hello,
I'm trying to merge two files (A and B). File A has 5000 cases (id, v1, v2) and File B has 4000 cases (id, v2, v3, v4). Is there a way to merge these two files so that it has all 5000 cases with id, v1-v4? Thank you in advance.
Tae

--
Bruce Weaver
bweaver@lakeheadu.ca
http://sites.google.com/a/lakeheadu.ca/bweaver/

"When all else fails, RTFM."

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Albert-Jan Roskam

Re: merging files

In reply to this post by taelee

_______________________________

> From: taelee <[hidden email]>
>To: [hidden email]
>Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 10:20 PM
>Subject: [SPSSX-L] merging files
>
>Hello,
>I'm trying to merge two files (A and B). File A has 5000 cases (id, v1, v2)
>and File B has 4000 cases (id, v2, v3, v4). Is there a way to merge these
>two files so that it has all 5000 cases with id, v1-v4? Thank you in
>advance.
>Tae

Hi,

Are the IDs unique? If so:
FILE HANDLE path /NAME = 'c:/your/path/here'.

FILE HANDLE file_a / NAME = 'path/file_a.sav'.
FILE HANDLE file_b / NAME = 'path/file_b.sav'.

GET FILE = file_a.
SORT CASES BY id.
DATASET NAME a.

GET FILE = file_b.
SORT CASES BY id.
MATCH FILES / FILE = a / IN = in_file_a / FILE = * / BY = id.
EXECUTE.

If either a, or b has non-unique ids, specify 'TABLE =' instead of ' FILE = ' for the file with non-unique IDs.
If both IDs are non-unique, you could use AGGREGATE, LAG, or CASESTOVARS to make the id unique.
Or you could make a many-to-many match, which is not possible out of the box. It's possible with syntax, but I'd use a cross join after loading the files into a database. Or use R.

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