GET /FILE={'file_name',file_handle} /DROP=var_list /KEEP=var_list /RENAME=(src_names=target_names)... /ENCODING='encoding'
GET
clears the current dictionary and active dataset and
replaces them with the dictionary and data from a specified file.
The FILE
subcommand is the only required subcommand.
Specify the system
file or portable file to be read as a string file name or
a file handle (see File Handles).
By default, all the variables in a file are read. The DROP
subcommand can be used to specify a list of variables that are not to be
read. By contrast, the KEEP
subcommand can be used to specify
variable that are to be read, with all other variables not read.
Normally variables in a file retain the names that they were
saved under. Use the RENAME
subcommand to change these names.
Specify,
within parentheses, a list of variable names followed by an equals sign
(‘=’) and the names that they should be renamed to. Multiple
parenthesized groups of variable names can be included on a single
RENAME
subcommand.
Variables' names may be swapped using a RENAME
subcommand of the form /RENAME=(
A B=
B A)
.
Alternate syntax for the RENAME
subcommand allows the parentheses to be
eliminated. When this is done, only a single variable may be renamed at
once. For instance, /RENAME=
A=
B. This alternate syntax is
deprecated.
DROP
, KEEP
, and RENAME
are executed in left-to-right order.
Each may be present any number of times. GET
never modifies a
file on disk. Only the active dataset read from the file
is affected by these subcommands.
pspp tries to automatically detect the encoding of string data in the
file. Sometimes, however, this does not work well encoding,
especially for files written by old versions of SPSS or pspp. Specify
the ENCODING
subcommand with an IANA character set name as its string
argument to override the default. The ENCODING
subcommand is a pspp
extension.
GET
does not cause the data to be read, only the dictionary. The data
is read later, when a procedure is executed.
Use of GET
to read a portable file is a pspp extension.