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From: | Frans Houweling |
Subject: | Re: String variables combining files |
Date: | Thu, 26 Mar 2015 13:47:35 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.5.0 |
On 26/03/2015 13:00, Alan Mead wrote:
By "I don't think the widest variable should be saved" what exactly do you mean? If I have email A32 in one file and email A31 in a second file, if the final merged file has email A31 then one or more email will be truncated by one character, which means data will be lost. For some people and some situations, data loss will be unacceptable. It seems obvious to me that the only way to prevent data loss would be to make the final merged string length equal to the longest of the widths encountered while merging. It sounds like you're suggesting that PSPP should just ignore this and continue but, if so, I don't understand what you mean by "ignore" and "continue"? Also, I've outlined why not saving the widest string for a variable is a problem; what harm would be created if the widest string was saved? Why is that a bad solution? -Alan
OK maybe I confuse width and content.In the case of numeric variables, if I MATCH with a table file, and both files have a var TURNOVER, I know my current TURNOVER var will be left alone. The question whether the TURNOVER column in the table file may have better data than the one in my workfile is a different matter and of no interest to me here. In this case, with string variables, I would prefer to retain just my original variable width. But I agree that with UPDATE in the case of strings the resulting string width could (should?) be set to the maximum width.
Friends :-)? frans
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