Re: Error during opening a sav file

[Ben Pfaff]

Manos provided me the file off-list.

Manos, I have some good news and some bad news. The first point of
good news is that I was able to recover your data; if there were 33
cases, then I recovered all of them. I will send it back to you
off-list.

The first point of bad news is that most of your variable labels and
value labels are gone. This is because of a character encoding issue.
Most of the characters in your text are Greek. This is fine, because
PSPP handles Unicode text just fine. However, this file was saved in
encoding CP1252. This encoding is a Latin character encoding (Windows
commonly uses it for English text) that does not contain the Greek
alphabet. When PSPP converted Greek characters to CP1252, it changed
them into ?. The original characters were lost. I am afraid that most
of the time you spent entering variable and value labels was,
therefore, lost.

If there is any good news to the latter point, it is that it means
that I (or another PSPP developer) need to spend some time updating
how PSPP chooses the character encoding it uses for data files that it
saves. If that work is successful, then it will mean that future users
won't lose work in the same way.

I am very sorry that this happened to you. I am sure that you are frustrated.


On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 9:16 AM Manos Markakis <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hello
> I try to open a sav file after i worked with it for 3 hours and when i open 
> it, the database that i had is lost and a message saying error C:/......  
> near offset 0x28f0: invalid variable name '???????' .  What can i do? How can 
> i open the file and most important will i be able to see my database or its 
> gone and i need to do it all over?
>
> Thank you