PSPP-BUG: About http://pspp.benpfaff.org/conversion.html

[Jack Burris]

Howdy!
I'm with the Social Science Computing Lab at UC Berkeley and have been 
working on a way to give users of our Survey Documentation and Analysis 
website a way to simply upload their data files from programs like SPSS, 
Stata, SAS, R, and PSPP to our server and have the data translated to 
.DDL format for use in our web application:

http://sda.berkeley.edu/

Our aim is to negate the need for proprietary (and expensive) software 
such as STAT TRANSFER or even the applications themselves (Stata, SPSS, 
etc . . .) to allow people to freely examine their data within SDA.

Presently, we're looking at using DDI DExT
( http://tools.ddialliance.org/?lvl1=product&lvl2=dext ) to convert from 
.SAV to .DDI format.

Then to convert from .DDI(version 2) to the .DDL format (used by SDA) we 
would use the DDI to DDL Conversion Service we already have on our 
server ( http://sda.berkeley.edu/ddi/tools/ )

However, I noticed you have a web application that takes a .SAV to text:

http://pspp.benpfaff.org/conversion.html

I'm wondering if it might be possible to take a look at the code for 
this?  The main problem has been getting a good file specification on 
the .POR, .DTA, and .SAV formats.  My thinking is perhaps I can suss 
some of this out from the code others have used to parse these files 
into other formats.

Thank you in advance for any light you can shed on this!
Jack Burris
Social Science Computing Lab
University of California, Berkeley


--
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned
with the human  problem all one's life and find
at the end that one has no more to  offer by way
of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
 --Aldous Huxley