SPSS Data Types

SPSS exposes numeric and string data types.

Certain specialized forms of data are handled by formats that impact visualization and export, not storage. The primary example of this is date and time data.

Numeric Data

Numeric data is stored as double-precision floating point.

Numeric Formats

Data formats adjust the visualized/exported representation of a data point, often only truncating the value. Adjusting these data formats does not destroy precision.

Given the literal value 123.45...

See here for the built-in library of numeric functions.

Date and Time Formats

Date data is stored as the number of seconds from midnight, October 14, 1582 to midnight on the specified date.

Datetime data is stored as the number of seconds to the specified time on the specified date.

Time data is stored as the number of seconds. This can be imagined as the number of seconds from midnight to the specified time, but that is not a necessary construct.

Keep in mind that 1 day = 60 (seconds) * 60 (minutes) * 24 (hours) = 86400 seconds.

Note that MMM appears as JAN, not 001.

Note that DATE11 and DATE9 differ in the representation of years (4 and 2 digits respectively). The American, European, and Sortable date formats have a similar feature by swapping [AES]DATE10 with [AES]DATE8.

See here for the built-in library of date and time functions.

String Data

String data is stored at a fixed length. This length is defined and adjusted through the format; Aw where w is the width.

String Formats

To explicitly re-size a string, try:

alter type VAR (a100).

To re-size a string to the smallest possible length (without losing data), try:

alter type VAR (a=amin).

The size does not automatically grow to accept longer values, and string expressions do not automatically strip trailing whitespace. Consider the below example:

data list list / numeric_zip_code (F5).
begin data
12345
1234
123
end data.

string padding (A2).
if numeric_zip_code lt 10000 padding="0".
if numeric_zip_code lt 1000  padding="00".
string zip_code (A5).
compute zip_code=concat(padding, string(numeric_zip_code,F5)).
execute.

This will produce:

The concat function is returning a 7-long string value, and SPSS is silently truncating it to 5-long before storing in zip_code.

There are better ways to zero-pad a string, but fundamentally the mistake is not wrapping string expressions in ltrim and rtrim calls.

See here for the built-in library of string functions.

String Literals

String literals are declared by wrapping a string value in quotes, either single (') or double (").

Quote marks within strings can be handled in one of two ways: either use the opposite quote mark to define the string, or escape the quote mark.

variable label var1 "Say ""Hello!""".
variable label var2 'Don''t say "Goodbye!"'.

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