Hi, There are two unanswered reports of this error (below) in read.spss() when used with a .por file. I had the same problem and in order to successfully read the file into R I downloaded spss, saved the data as .dat tab-delimited, and then used read.table(). The point is that spss successfully read the same .por data file (the Polity II data freely available from ICPSR) that R couldn't read. So, I assume this is a bug in R.
> politydata<-read.spss("polityii.por") Error in read.spss("polityii.por") : error reading portable-file dictionary In addition: Warning message: Expected variable count record in: read.spss("polityii.por") > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.