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Re: save function


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Re: save function
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 10:16:39 -0500

On  6-Mar-2005, Mike Miller <address@hidden> wrote:

| That is a reason to have the feature, but it is not a reason to impose it 
| on all users for every data file they save.  We often create data files in 
| octave to be imported into other programs.  It would be very nice if we 
| could save in ascii format without the header lines.  Something like this 
| would do:
| 
|    `-ascii2'
|          save the data as plain text without Octave header information
| 
| Haven't we had a lot of questions/complaints that would be resolved by the 
| addition of this feature?
| 
| Maybe this would work only for 2-d arrays (matrices), but that is often 
| the sort of thing we are trying to save:  Table data where rows are 
| records and columns are fields.  Octave save -ascii does what we want 
| except that it has those extra initial lines that must be removed by some 
| external program before we can use the data.

Sorry, I didn't see this message before I sent my previous reply.

I don't think we want -ascii2 to mean "do the Matlab-compatible -ascii
thing" because it just trades one incompatibility for another.  If we
want compatibility, then we have to make Octave's "save -ascii" do
what Matlab's does.  That includes saving character strings as numeric
data and allowing multiple values to be stored in a single file (with
no header information that gives you a clue about what variables are
where -- I guess when saving the entire workspace, the variables are
stored in alphabetical order?) and so on.  We can still keep Octave's
old -ascii behavior, but we will need rename the option.  As I noted
in my previous message, this is likely to cause some pain.  How can we
minimize it?

jwe



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