Re: In dire need of help

[Alan Mead]

Nancy,

I haven't run in to this problem and I cannot tell you exactly
step-by-step what to do, but I can explain what's going on and give you
some advice.

Incompatible encodings implies that the files have encodings that are
not all the same and the warning is that you could be surprised by the
results of combining them. I think if you converted to a common encoding
(like UTF-8), this problem would go away.

Encodings are the tables that relate numeric data to characters. For
example, the character 1 is ASCII 49 and a space is 32, so if your ASCII
data file has '1 1' that's represented by bytes 49, 32, 49. ASCII only
defines 127 characters that include some invisible codes and the
characters on your keyboard. UTF-8 uses the same 127 characters (so the
first 127 characters overlap) and then UTF-8 provides many more to
represent many different characters. There are many other encodings,
like Latin-1/ISO 8859-1. If you use a different encoding, the meaning of
the numeric values of your file changes and could potentially surprise
you. For example, when people copy from a Word document and paste into
something expecting ASCII, the smartquotes get pasted as three random
(strange) characters. Encodings are also particularly a problem for any
data that uses any language other than English.

For example, I recently analyzed some data where the survey responses
included "em dashes" (which is like a hyphen, but longer; the character
is not part of the ASCII set). I had to use a program to convert to
UTF-8 and add a BOM so that SPSS would read the data properly. A BOM is
a sequence of three characters at the beginning of the file that tells
compatible software the encoding of a file. If you don't have a BOM, you
need to tell the software. PSPP provides an encoding subcommand on get:

https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/manual/html_node/GET.html

If you think this seems confusing, I think it is fairly confusing, but
the fundamental issue is that computers were originally designed to
handle a subset of English language characters and then had to be
extended to handle the multitude of other characters needed by all the
world's languages and data. If your data are in exotic encodings, you
may need to learn more about this. Otherwise, UTF-8 is likely to be
sufficient. It may even be possible to convert to ASCII.

The link below is to an answer that purports to show you how to detect
and control the encoding of files on Windows using Notepad. I prefer a
more powerful (free, open-source) editor called Notepad++, but I'm not
sure it's any better in detecting and controlling encodings. Again, I
think if you can probably save all three files as "UTF-8", possibly
including a BOM, this error will go away.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3710374/get-encoding-of-a-file-in-windows

-Alan


On 10/7/2019 5:35 PM, address@hidden wrote:
>
> I am trying to merge 3 files, I have read what post on the server but they
> are not very helpful.  I am not a programmer and new to this application.  I
> use the ADD FILES but keep getting the error Warning: combining files with
> incompatible encodings. String data may not be represented correctly.  But I
> do not see any file to see the data represented.  Basically I do not have a
> clue and have searched on every subject and video I can think of to see if
> there are step by step instructions to fix this problem.  Can you assist.
> Wish there was a way I could do this thru the GUI.
>
>  
>
> Running version: GNU pspp 1.2.0-g0fb4db
>
> Operating system Wins 10 Home 64-bit
>
>  
>
> Thanks,
>
>  
>
> Nancy Cotton
>
> Data Manager 
>
> I5O Consulting Services
>
> Email:  <mailto:address@hidden>
> address@hidden
>
> Website:  <http://www.i5oconsulting.com/> www.i5oconsulting.com
>
> 888.591.7781
>
>  
>
>  
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pspp-users mailing list
> address@hidden
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-users

-- 

Alan D. Mead, Ph.D.
President, Talent Algorithms Inc.

science + technology = better workers

http://www.alanmead.org

"You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. 
You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such 
horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, 
so alone, only you're not. See, in all our 
searching, the only thing we've found that makes 
the emptiness bearable, is each other."

-- Carl Sagan, Contact