IBM® SPSS® Amos™ 28

An Amos text output file, with the file name extension AmosOutput, is an XHTML document. One advantage of the XHTML format is that, besides being suitable for presentation, it also designed for processing by other programs.

A key step in writing a program to access an Amos text output file is determining an XPath expression for the portion of the file that you want the program to read. For example, if you want your program to perform calculations using the factor score weights computed by Amos, you need to construct an XPath expression that tells where to find the factor score weights in the text output file. The Amos Output viewer can assist in this task.

While viewing an Amos text output file in the output viewer, you can right-click any portion of the displayed text output and select XPath from the menu that pops up. The XPath window then displays an XPath expression that points to the right-clicked portion of the text output file. The XPath window's Copy button can be used to place the XPath expression on the Windows clipboard for pasting into your program.

When viewing an XPath expression for a table or part of a table, note that splitting tables affects only the way a text output (*.AmosOutput) file is displayed in the output viewer. It does not modify the file itself. For this reason, make sure that tables are unsplit before displaying an XPath expression for a table or table element, in order to be sure that the table structure that is displayed is the same as the table structure in the underlying (*.AmosOutput) file.