Re: [bug #15820] Can not read sav file

[John Darrington]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 07:52:14AM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     
     > In view of this rather less than ideal design of SPSS system files, I
     > think the only thing we can do is to forget validation of variable
     > names when reading system files (or at least make the validation
     > rather sloppy). 
     
     How about if we disallow names that begin with the "forbidden"
     characters @ and #, but forgo other forms of validation?
     Allowing @ and # could throw a wrench into other code, but other
     "invalid" characters will just make it difficult or impossible to
     refer to those variables.


That sounds reasonable. It would cause a problem if there is a locale
which considers '@' and '#' to be alphabetic characters, but I'm not
aware of any such locale.  There may also be other characters that we
can safely disallow in any part of a name, for example '=', '+', '/'
etc.

J'

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