SPSS version 12 file format

[Rob Messer]

Hello.  My company has been using PSPP for our clients who want to turn 
online survey data into an SPSS format file.  Basically we just output a 
syntax file containing all the data plus "SAVE OUTFILE" at the end and 
run that through PSPP to create the .sav file.  This generally works 
pretty well, although for very large files we've had a few problems.

Anyway, several of our clients have now upgraded to SPSS v12 or v13, and 
they want to use the long variable names that don't exist in the older 
formats.  So, I was wondering if anybody wanted to take on a project to 
update PSPP to output in the new file format.  We would pay for this of 
course, and presumably this work would also help move PSPP development 
forward.

There is one problem -- the SPSS v12 format is not published that I know 
of, it would probably have to be reverse engineered unless somebody can 
find that file format somehow.  It may not be that much different from 
the old format except for the long variable names, I'm not sure.  The 
time to figure out the file format would just have to be factored into 
the cost.

In addition we might also be willing to pay for somebody to code a 
direct SPSS output file routine.  We are using perl to extract the data, 
and it would be convenient to just output the file directly instead of 
creating the syntax file and converting that to the .sav file.

So if anyone on this list is interested or at least wants to talk about 
it please get in touch.  Thank you,

Rob Messer
President/CEO
IntelliSurvey, Inc.
http://www.intellisurvey.com
949-481-2370