I am exporting data in spss format to take into PSPP.

In Limesurvey I have in the advanced settings for each question specified the variable type e.g. nominal, scale or ordinal. I cannot specify that a question answer is text/string.

All the difficult stuff seems to have gone OK and when I run the .sps file there are no errors and the .sps file is all pink where it should be showing that variables have been defined properly.

However where some of the variables are text then I have this issue:

Where a respondee has used a truncation the answer has been split into two for example.

Like coming to work. We're all happy working here.

Becomes:

Like coming to work. We

And the next bit is shunted along into the next variable column which is a likert scale and the rest of the data is all shunted along into the wrong variables for that respondee.

Have the same issue as well with the variable surname if we have an O'Leary.

(Respondees who have not used truncation have all their data against the right variable headings which makes me think that everything has mostly gone right with the export.)

The apostrophe in the we're is being read as a delimiter.

Now the in the .sps:
/delimiters="," i.e. a comma
/Qualifier="'" as a single quote

And all the variables are properly shown as being numbers or text e.g.:
/Variables=
V20 A15
V21 A255
V22 F1
V23 F1
V24 F1
V25 F1

e.g. V20 is text 15 characters max, V22 is a scale etc.

In the .dat file I notice that data is shown as:
'5','like coming to work. We're all happy here.','3',

And it is using single quote/apostrophes as the qualifier which is causing the problem.

With SPS I was expecting it to be double quotes:
"5","like coming to work. We're all happy here.","3",

As this is the qualifier that SPSS usually uses:

/Qualifier="""

I can export in.csv and bring that into PSPP/SPSS but the spss format would be best as it keeps not only the question codes as variables but also the associated question text as a variable label which will be great for making graphs and cross tab tables meaningful. E.g. rather than just MS1 I will have MS1 Management style.

In summary the bug is:

In the sps file the qualifier is set as single quote/apostrophe:
/qualifier="'"

When it seems that spss normally uses a double quote as the qualifier:
/qualifier="""

So Limesurvey needs option to export to spss form using the double quote qualifier or perhaps any qualifier at the user's discretion.