Reading data files

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

  Jens>  Hi, I am using Octave often for simulations of experimental
  Jens> data. Therfore, I also have to read in these data. The data files
  Jens> usually start with a header with the experimental conditions,
  Jens> commented out with either a '%' or a '#'. While this leads to no
  Jens> problem e.g. with Matlab, Octave doesn't seem to like these header
  Jens> lines and complains (file name is `a1')

Use 'aload.m' (and 'asave.m') from the octave-ci package at

        ftp://ftp.ci.tuwien.ac.at/pub/octave/octave-ci.tar.gz

Note that JWE has just integrated a good bunch of these functions into the
pre-release of 2.0.14. 

  Jens> Is there a way to avoid having to edit each data file to remove the
  Jens> headers?  (Of course, on could easily delete the header with grep or
  Jens> friends, but this would mean to have every file twice and, besides, I
  Jens> forget to go through this procedure constantly...)

If you look at the source for aload/asave, you see how they quite smartly
embed Unix shell/awk/grep commands in .m files. That is a very useful
technique which one can adapt or extend.

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