Re: Reading tab-delimited ASCII files

[Matthias Brennwald]

> Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 21:14:54 -0700 (PDT)
> From: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Reading tab-delimited ASCII files
> To: "James Sherman Jr." <address@hidden>
> Cc: Matthias Brennwald <address@hidden>,
>         address@hidden
> Message-ID:
>         <address@hidden>
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>
>   Hi all,
>
> maybe you can strip your data from the first 2 columns, substitute the N/A for
> NaN, save the result in a temp file and load that temp file?  As in the
> following code (for unix system)
>
>    ## Make data octave-readable
>    system (["perl -w -p -e 's/.*?\t.*?\t//; s|N/A||ig' < ",your_file_name, "> 
> /tmp/some_safe_temp_file_name.txt"]);
>
>    ## Read it
>    your_data = load ("/tmp/some_safe_temp_file_name.txt")
>
>    ## let's be good and clean up
>    unlink ("/tmp/some_safe_temp_file_name.txt")
>
> (in production code, you'd want to use a temp name returned by tmpnam()).
>
>   Hth,
>
>   Etienne

Yes, I could do that. But then my program will rely on the existence of 
the tools required to re-format the data files (e.g. perl in your 
example), and the program will also have to call different commands on 
different operating systems... that sound like asking for problems to 
me. I therefore prefer to do it using Octave commands only.

Matthias