Re: handling strings

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Stefan van der Walt wrote:

> To read in the data, you might want to take a look at 'textread' in 
> octave-forge (recently, a C++ version was submitted).
>
> It shouldn't be difficult to modify it to do your string comparisons as 
> well.


Very nice!  It does work well for me.  I am actually using it to read in 
pedigree data for genetic analyses.  When sex is designated by integers 
(usually 1=male, 2=female), this seems to always work very nicely:

[fam,indiv,father,mother,sex] = textread("file.ped", "%s %s %s %s %d%*[^\n]");

After that, a series of strcmp commands can be used to do the work of 
recoding fam, father and mother.

One oddity is that sex (the %d column) becomes a row vector instead of a 
column vector.  That's OK now that I know about it, but I think it would 
make more sense for columnar data to be stored by default in column 
vectors.

Thanks again for a great tip!

Mike

--
Michael B. Miller, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
and Institute of Human Genetics
University of Minnesota
http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/



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