How can I loop through variables in SPSS? I want to avoid code duplication.

Posted by chucknelson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by chucknelson
Published on 2010-05-21T18:12:54Z Indexed on 2010/05/21 18:20 UTC
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spss

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loops

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statistics

Is there a "native" SPSS way to loop through some variable names? All I want to do is take a list of variables (that I define) and run the same procedure for them:

pseudo-code - not really a good example, but gets the point across...

for i in varlist['a','b','c']
do
  FREQUENCIES VARIABLES=varlist[i] / ORDER=ANALYSIS.
end

I've noticed that people seem to just use R or Python SPSS plugins to achieve this basic array functionality, but I don't know how soon I can get those configured (if ever) on my installation of SPSS.

SPSS has to have some native way to do this...right?

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