PSPP-BUG: [bug #40864] When a variable has no label, DISPLAY DICTIONARY puts the "Format:" line in it's place

[anonymous]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #40864 (project pspp):

My higher level goal... actually, there's several. Let me digress :-)

I'm working at a social science data archive, and we've got a couple thousand
.sav files in our archive which until now are considered the master files.

Now we intend to switch master to plain text files for all data and metadata.

I'm exporting the data and metadata using two fully distinct tools and map the
exports on each other to make sure the export is really, positively,
absolutely right and reproduces the dataset with all info and errors therein.

I first tried pspp-dump-sav, which looks nice, but it's output is
unconditionally latin1-encoded, while I require UTF-8. (There are datasets
with 20+ original languages, including non-latin alphabets as greek and
russian). So I fell back to DISPLAY DICTIONARY in csv, which looks sane
enough. At least, I still feel sane. That said, I'm a complete newbie to PSPP,
so it's probable that there's an output format that's better suited.          
                                   
 
Further goals are then:
- have a metadata format that's easy both on the eyes and to parse.
- to fix SPSS screwups that assembled by carrying files through the versions
for 30+ years and create new ones. (I find them by the dozen by mapping the
independent exports.)
- have scripts that convert the metadata to DDI-XML, to SPSS syntax and
whatnot (as in STATA, R, prolly SAS, etc).

Thanks,
Andre


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