SPSS Statistics v25 Unicode default change: managing mixed-version syntax repositories without a migration utility
Context SPSS Statistics v25 switched the default SET UNICODE setting from OFF (v24 and earlier) to ON . Syntax files saved under the old default use the system locale code page (e.g., Windows-1252), while v25+ saves as UTF-8. This creates encoding mismatches when sharing syntax libraries across versions 24–29, especially for string literals, variable labels,