[comp.soft-sys.stat.spss] How to read data file directly from a URL

An interesting idea from the SPSS newsgroup.

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Path: 
shelby.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!51g2000cwl.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail
From: "Mike Lacy" <Michael.Lacy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.stat.spss
Subject: How to read data file directly from a URL
Date: 4 Jan 2007 14:19:05 -0800
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Message-ID: <1167949144.995682.126880@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Greetings old friends--- haven't posted in a while because I'm using
SPSS less and because I've had to start using the Google groups
interface, which annoys me.

On topic:
Is there any convenient way to use SPSS read a data file directly from
a URL?  I'm thinking of something like:

get file = "http://www.myspssdatafiles/GSS2004.sav"; .

I suppose something like this could be implemented via OBDC, but that
doesn't seem very easy.  At least Stata (R?) has the equivalent syntax,
and I was hoping the same thing could be done some way in SPSS.

Regards,
Mike Lacy


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-- 
Ben Pfaff 
email: blp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
web: http://benpfaff.org