SPSS files with extension .sve

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Dear list members,

Sorry for a non-Stata question, but I came across some SPSS files with a non-standard file extension .sve instead of traditional .sav. While my SPSS to Stata import routines don't have any difficulties processing them, I wonder if there is any special story about this deviation. Was that extension standard at some point in time? or on some platform? Was there a converter saving data with such an extension, or are they genuine?

I believe this is not a typo, since I came across 6 files all with the same extension. All files were marked as originating from SPSS for Unix Release 6.1 (Solaris 2.3) and saved in early 2004.

Thank you, Sergiy Radyakin

[Richard Williams]

http://personal.psc.isr.umich.edu/yu...id/raceid.html

This 1997 paper used a lot of files with the sve extension. I will try to find the entire paper later. Perhaps it is from a foreign language version of spss.

[Richard Williams]

http://www.fak11.lmu.de/it/_Struktur.../interview.pdf

sve shows up in this IBM SPSS document and refers to the Swedish language. I don't know if that explains the mystery or not.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Dear Richard,

thank you very much for looking into this. I think while the SVE is a common abbreviation for Swedish language (Svenska) it wouldn't be used for the data file extension. And if so ,then we would observe also numerous files with other language codes in them. There is also no Swedish language content in any of the files mine or the ones you quoted. But the common part is that they are all coming from non-Windows/Mac platform, e.g the one you pointed to is from SPSS Release 4.0 for IBM RS/6000. This also looks like the oldest file I've ever encountered (produced by the earliest version of SPSS). I tried to compile a table of different platforms and versions that I used for testing a while ago, and yes, 4.0 appears to beat the record, thank you!

Best regards, Sergiy Radyakin

[Richard Williams]

Yes, I think the Swedish bit was a red herring. Stat/Transfer had no trouble converting the file to Stata format. Documentation for .sve may be lost to history or at least is pretty well buried if it is on the web.