Re: limitations to missing values ?

[Ben Pfaff]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 12:48:45AM +0100, news wrote:
> To my surprise a MISSING VALUES does not work.
> 
> I ave a metric variable with the missing values 7 8 9 and want to add the
> value of 3 to the list of missings.
> 
> So, I tried first the first command, and as this did not work  then the
> others in this list :
> miss val political (3, 7 , 8, 9).

The command above is invalid because at most three discrete missing
values are supported.  This is a limitation of the SPSS data file
format, so it can't easily be fixed.

There was a bug here, in that PSPP did not report the error.  I've now
fixed that problem.

> miss val political (3 thru 9).
> miss val political (3 thru hi).

The above commands should work, though.

> And never the 3 becomes missing !

> Are there limits to the number of missing a variable can have ? I looked
> into the doc , but did not find info about an eventual limit.

The documentation for the MISSING VALUES command says:

       Specify a list of variables, followed by a list of their
    user-missing values in parentheses.  Up to three discrete values may
    be given, or, for numeric variables only, a range of values
    optionally accompanied by a single discrete value.  Ranges may be
    open-ended on one end, indicated through the use of the keyword 'LO'
    or 'LOWEST' or 'HI' or 'HIGHEST'.