What kind of control is item_5, and what type of values can it contain?
  
             

 Yes, that would have been handy to explicitely mention. <br>

It's a target variable box with the multiple variables option on.

 In that case, the pasted text should have been line wrapped. Can you send me the spd file (peck@spss.com)?
  
             

 having same problem<br>

can you line wrap the text that is substituted for "%%item_5%%", as the text will not be known until run time?

 None of the Python code can be line wrapped by the dialog box or the Syntax Editor, because those components do not parse anything but standard SPSS code. If you can't manage just by putting the item on a line by itself in the CDB syntax window, you would need to create an extension command so that the dialog could be expressed in standard-style SPSS syntax. That would then be wrapped automatically just as if it were built-in SPSS syntax.<br>

Information on creating extension commands is available on this site and via the programmability documentation installed with the Essentials. You can also find many examples in the Extension Commands collection in the downloads area.

HTH,
Jon Peck

 Thanks for replying, I will look into extension commands.<br>

Do you know if I would still be able to reference the variables from the dialog's target list from within the extension command, and how I would go about that, or if there is any other way to access the variables in the dialog's target list without the %%this_value%%?

Don't know if I'm completely missing something but it seems like I'd still have to dump the target list string into the syntax editor in order to pass it to the extension command? Or maybe just easier to do it without using the dialog builder?

Seems like one of those things that is way more complicated than it should be.

Basically what I'm doing is splitting the string of variables from the target list to do some repetitive renaming/recoding, but if I add more than about 10 variables at a time it hits the 251 byte limit, so it works fine but could be a little nicer.

Thanks again, much appreciated.

 The strategy would be to define the extension command syntax with a keyword like<br>
  VARIABLES of type VariableNameList. The XML below could be the entire command definition, although you might want to have other parameters, too.<br>
  This is then processed by the extension.py module, which calls your Python code with the keyword values as parameters. This will be more obvious if you look at one of these commands. You define the syntax tokens to be received and between the SPSS parser and the extension module code, the error checking/command validation is all done for you.<br>

SPSSINC CREATE DUMMIES is a simple extension command you could use as an example.

This text would be in a file named, say, MY_WHATEVER.xml, and your Python module would be named
MY_WHATEVER.py

<Command xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="extension.xsd" Name="MY WHATEVER" Language="Python">
<Subcommand Name="" IsArbitrary="False" Occurrence="Optional">
<Parameter Name="VARIABLES" ParameterType="VariableNameList"/>
</Subcommand>

Then, in the CDB, you would declare your syntax like
MY WHATEVER VARIABLES=%%this_value%%

That text can be wrapped by the SPSS line wrapper code in the dialog subsystem, because it follows the rules for SPSS syntax. And to the user, everything looks like a standard SPSS Statistics command. Python can't be wrapped by SPSS code, because it has a very different set of rules about where lines can be broken.

HTH,
Jon Peck

 Ok I think it's making sense now, should have it from here.<br>
  merci