LoadWave problem: loading a matrix and dealing with case of header only

Share icon

I am loading delimited text files into Igor. I would like to store each file as a 2D wave. There are hundreds and some may have headers but no data. How can I best handle this scenario?

Ideally for the no-data file, I'd like to make a 2D wave that is empty. This is because for each experiment I have three different files and I need to be able to do calculations between the resulting 2D waves using a naming convention to do so. Right now I do for one type of file:

LoadWave/M/O/J/K=1/L={0,1,0,0,0}/P=csvDiskFolder/A=$wName/Q fileName

and I get an error for files with no data rows.

I previously asked a similar question https://www.wavemetrics.com/forum/general/telling-igor-skip-empty-data-…

But that solution doesn't work here because the file has a header row, plus I don't know how to use GetRTError correctly to handle error suppression. Any help appreciated!

Thank you! For anyone else that runs into this. Here is my solution.

STATIC Function CheckForData(pathName, filePath)
	// header (column names) is the first line
	// check that first data row is not blank
	String pathName	 // Name of symbolic path or ""
	String filePath		 // Name of file or partial path relative to symbolic path.

	Variable refNum

	Open/R/P=$pathName refNum as filePath
	
	String buffer, text
	Variable line = 0
	
	do
		FReadLine refNum, buffer
		if (strlen(buffer) == 0)
				return line
		endif
		line += 1
	while(line < 2)
	
	return line	   // returns 2 if there was at least 1 data row
End

Using an if-else-endif I check whether this function returns > 1 and if so, load using LoadWave, otherwise make a dummy wave with the same name.

March 6, 2020 at 01:06 am - Permalink