Has anybody already created a way to read "tagged" data into SPSS?

Posted by Art Kendall on
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Has-anybody-already-created-a-way-to-read-tagged-data-into-SPSS-tp5740888.html

I am trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel. I could cobble together a one-off Macro in WordPerfect, but thought that there could already be a generalized approach these days since a generalized approach was built into FORTRAN before 1972.

 "Tagged" may not be the correct term.  If members know of alternative vocabulary for this that would help me do searches, please let me know.

These are plain text files with repeated fields something like this.
a field delimiter
a text string tag
content delimiter
a text string content

a field delimiter
a text string tag
content delimiter
a text string content
. . .
A case delimiter.

In the resulting set of variables those cases where a tagged field was not encountered the variable was blank.

In 1972 in FORTRAN had a format like this mostly used for .INI filetypes. These were a way to do things like SPSS SET commands.

For example,
The US Library of Congress makes its card catalog  available in "tagged" format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARC_standards
https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/nlr/

DIALOG and Orbit were database systems with "tagged" abstracts of journal articles, etc.  the downloaded abstracts had 'tags' for journal name, volume, issue, pages, date, author, abstract,.