How can I create a web page that shows aggregate data from Sawtooth surveys?

Question

I'm guessing this won't apply to 99.99% of anyone that sees this. I've been doing some Sawtooth survey programming at work and I've been needing to create a webpage that shows some aggregate data from the completed surveys. I was just wondering if anyone else has done this using the flat files that Sawtooth generates and how you went about doing it. I only know very basic Perl and the server I use does not have PHP so I'm somewhat at a loss for solutions. Anything you've got would be helpful.

Edit: The problem with offering example files is that it's more complicated. It's not a single file and it occasionally gets moved to a different file with a different format. The complexities added in there are why I ask this question.

Answer 1

What format is Sawtooth in (maybe an example might help you get some answers)?

Answer 2

Doesn't Sawtooth export into CSV format? There are many Perl parsers for CSV files. Just about every language has a CSV parser or two (or twelve), and MS Excel can open them directly, and they're still plaintext so you can look at them in any text editor.

I know our version of Sawtooth at work (which is admittedly very old) exports Sawtooth data into SPSS format, which can then be exported into various spreadsheet formats including CSV, if all else fails.

If you have a flat (fixed-width field) file, you can easily parse it in Perl using regular expressions or just taking substrings of each line one at a time, assuming you know the width of the fields. Your question is too general to give much better advice, sorry.

Matching the values up from a plaintext file with meta-data (variable names and labels, value labels etc.) is more complicated unless you already have the meta-data in some script-readable format. Making all of that stuff available on a web page is more complicated still. I've done it and it can be a bit of a lengthy project to roll your own. There are packages you can buy, like SDA, which will help you build a website where people can browse and download your survey data and view your codebooks.

Honestly though the easiest thing to do if you're posting statistical data on a website is get the data into SPSS or SAS or another statistics package format and post those files for download directly. Then you don't have to worry about it.