Re: Handling heterogeneous files

[Rob Mahurin]

On Jun 18, 2009, at 5:39 PM, ws wrote:
> I often have data files that have different types in their columns  
> -- for
> example, an ISO timestamp in the first column (like  
> "1990-03-04T14:01:01"),
> floats in the other columns, and the occasional string columns  
> (["ok"; "ok";
> "notok"; ...]).
>
> Is there an easy way to import these and deal with them in octave/  
> matlab?  I
> especially would be happy if there were an automagic conversion of  
> dates to
> Julian times, strings to integers (like factors), or whatever.  If  
> there is a
> way to get it into a cell array, that would be OK, too.  What I  
> want to avoid
> is writing a looping function with a bunch of calls to scanf ...

Look at "textread" in the io package on octave-forge for messy input  
files.

The "date" program in GNU coreutils is pretty good for automagic date/ 
time conversion.  It doesn't have julian output but there is time_t  
output (%s) which is okay.  If you know the date format you can use  
strptime within octave.

Cheers,
Rob

--
Rob Mahurin
University of Manitoba, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy
at:     Oak Ridge National Laboratory   865 207 2594
        Oak Ridge, Tennessee            address@hidden