Need to extract numeric data from a string of ascii

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Fri, 11/21/2008 - 08:58 am

I running a monte carlo program that generates ascii data files in multielement lines. Below is a typical example of one of the line:

0.17758E+01 -0.14488E+01 -0.41742E+00 0.85527E+00 -0.47925E-01 -0.51596E+00 0.65037E-05 0.10000E+01 0.69302E+02

I don't have much control over the output format for this data string, except that I have the option of writing the file in binary, but I'm not ready to make that leap yet.

I would like to read in the line and extract each numeric value. I'm fairly new at igor, and I'm having difficulties getting the string functions to do what I want of them. Useful help or advice would be appreciated :)
It would be helpful if you posted the relevant code you've written that you're having problems with.

Also, do you have more information about your options with regards to writing the file in binary? It's possible that loading the data from a binary file would actually be easier than loading it from a text file.

November 21, 2008 at 11:16 am - Permalink

I believe I found a solution for reading a string of text and extracting the numerical data:

FReadLine refNum, str
    sscanf str, "%e%e%e%e%e%e%e%e%e",xpos,ypos,zpos,ucos,vcos,wcos,erg,wgt,tme


where xpo, ypo, ... , tme are my variables.

This (brute force method) will work for my purposes.

November 21, 2008 at 01:03 pm - Permalink

True. However, if your ASCII data file contains multiple lines, all which look like the example line you gave (basically, a space deliminated text file), then I think it would probably be easier to use the LoadWave operation to load each of the values into a wave.

November 22, 2008 at 06:49 am - Permalink