I'm looking for a solution for producing SPSS format data files for loading into SPSS. The few offerings I can find are all commercial.
Has anyone experience with generating SPSS-format data files using open-source, freeware or home-grown solutions?
I'm not even sure that the file format is "open". Any hints appreciated (any language is fine, although java, perl or ruby preferred).
What exactly do you want to produce? Data files (sav), Syntax files (sps) or Output files (spv). SPSS is a highly commercial product and I very much assume the file formats associated with SPSS are proprietary.
Python has an SPSS API. So maybe you should look into that one.
To close the loop on this question, I avoided the need to delve into proprietary data formats by writing a syntax file to read in a standard comma-separated text file that I exported from the system that was the source of my data.
Syntax files themselves use a proprietary "language" to describe the load procedure. Unfortunately, open source alternatives to SPSS (e.g. PSPP) do not support the syntax language to the full extent needed to replicate this solution.