SPSS: how to loop and concatenate values to create file

Question

Hi I have a syntax file and I want to create several .sav files

for 87 to 95
  for 1 to 12
    FILE HANDLE EPA/NAME='C:\Users\gma\Downloads/pub0187.prn'/LRECL=138.
    DATA LIST FILE=EPA/
     STATES_PROV  001 - 007
     ...          .....
     VARIABLE LABELS
     ...
     MISSING VALUES
     ....

    SAVE OUTFILE='C:\Users\gma\Downloads/epa0187.sav'.
  end
end

Output file

epa0187.sav
epa0287.sav
epa0387.sav
...
epa0188.sav
...
epa0189.sav
...
epa1295.sav

Input file

pub0187.prn
pub0287.prn
...
pub0188.prn
...
pub0189.prn
...
pub1295.prn

So in other words I want to create a .sav file for each month from January 1987 up to December 1995.

JKP · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-19 22:26:11Z

2

You could create a macro loop in standard Statistics syntax, but here is a solution using Python code within Statistics. Note that the indentations are important.

begin program.
import spss

for year in range(87, 96):  # note stop is one beyond
    for month in range(1, 13):  # one beyond
        spss.Submit(r"""FILE HANDLE EPA
/NAME='C:\Users\gma\Downloads/pub%(month)s%(year)s.prn'/LRECL=138.
DATA LIST FILE=EPA/
 STATES_PROV  001 - 007
 ...          .....
 VARIABLE LABELS
 ...
 MISSING VALUES
 ....

SAVE OUTFILE='C:\Users\gma\Downloads/epa%(month)s%(year)s.sav'.""" % locals())
end program.

edited Apr 19, 2017 at 22:26

answered Apr 19, 2017 at 21:20

JKP

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2 Comments

eli-k Over a year ago

note that the file names have a two digit number for all months, so month needs to be 01, 02 ... instead of 1, 2, 3 ...

JKP Over a year ago

to get that, change the formats for the month parts like this: %(month)02d instead of %(month)s

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