Ah. I can easily explain what the problem is. SPSS data files have a variable record for each variable. For string variables with a width greater than 8, they actually have a variable record for every 8 columns of width (rounding up). Lots of places in data files refer to variables by the index that includes such extra records. So, if you have a string variable with width 24, and it's the third variable in the file following two numeric variables, then it will have indexes 2, 3, and 4. When such a variable is referenced by index, only index 2 is supposed to be used. PSPP complains if index 3 or 4 is used instead, and SPSS (apparently) crashes instead.
Maybe I should make PSPP more tolerant, just giving a warning instead of an error. If so, then it would be easy to fix up a file with this error by using pspp-convert. On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 10:24 AM Ignácz, István <istvan.ign...@neticle.com> wrote: > Thanks, Ben for the quick response! > > Yes, the ultimate goal is to add a patch to the package which fixes the > problem or throws an error if the user of the package (in this case me) > provides invalid input. I think I'm facing the later. > > One significant difference between the test file and my case is that in my > case no variables and no cases are recognized so the reading process > basically crashes. > I think I've found the part where the PSPP ends up in a 'goto error' > (sys-file-reader.813) but I lack the context of what's going on here. I > guess the value labels could be misconfigured? Maybe there's a value in a > record that doesn't have a label in the variable settings? > > If I would know a little bit more about what happens in that part and why > that causes an error, maybe I could force my (and tiamo's) code to reliably > produce the error. > > Thanks, > István > > On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 18:51, Ben Pfaff <b...@cs.stanford.edu> wrote: > > > I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but PSPP has a test case > > that intentionally provokes this error message. I'm attaching the file it > > produces. > > > > I guess the ultimate goal here should be to fix tiamo's package? > > > > On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 9:42 AM Ignácz, István < > istvan.ign...@neticle.com> > > wrote: > > > >> Greetings, > >> > >> I think this is not the usual topic on this list, excuse me if you find > it > >> off-topic. > >> > >> I'm facing a tough bug in my software and I'm looking for some help to > be > >> able to take the next steps. > >> > >> Our software generates sav files via tiamo's package: > >> https://packagist.org/packages/tiamo/spss > >> Usually, everything works fine, but in some cases, we generate malformed > >> files. In this case, SPSS crashes without any notice, however, PSPP at > >> least gives a useful error message: > >> Variable index n refers to long string continuation. > >> > >> I cannot reproduce this issue on my side, so I tried to reverse engineer > >> the PSPP codebase to find any cases when it could occur. So far not with > >> much luck. > >> > >> Could you help me with some example cases? > >> > >> Thanks for your help, > >> István > >> > > > > -- > > *István Ignácz* > Software Engineer @ Neticle > > +36 30 460 5356 > istvan.ign...@neticle.com > neticle.com > > <https://neticle.com/mediaintelligence/en/> <https://zurvey.io/> > <https://api.neticle.com/> <https://data.neticle.com/documentation> > > Neticle Labs Ltd. > Address: H-1082 Budapest, Leonardo da Vinci 41. (2nd floor/12) > Billing address: H-1213 Budapest, Veto street 10. >
