Append to Existing Waves

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Tue, 05/03/2011 - 04:43 pm

In the Load Waves dialog I would like to see an "Append to existing waves" check box underneath the "Overwrite existing waves" box (though they would have to be mutually exclusive like radio buttons). If checked, this would cause waves to be concatenated with existing waves of the same names, if any.

I suggested this once before and people seemed to misunderstand what I had in mind. Here's the scenario: I collect a long series of data, but the collection gets interrupted for one reason or another, by accident or design, yielding several files that really belong to the same sequential data set. The addition of this one check box would make it trivial for me to load the files one by one and end up with one set of continuous waves. Although there are various ways to do that after the waves are loaded in Igor, they're all rather cumbersome when handling a lot of waves (which I do). The way I usually handle this situation now is to concatenate the files in a text editor before loading them.
andyfaff wrote:
-OR-
cat a.txt b.txt c.txt > concat.txt


Does that work under Windows or just the terminal on Mac? What would be the equivalent under Windows?

--
J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAHuntsville

May 5, 2011 at 08:17 am - Permalink

the best thing about doing it on the command line, if this sort of concatenation is useful, is you can do stuff like:
cat *.txt > concat.txt
which will concatenate all .txt files.

May 5, 2011 at 05:28 pm - Permalink

The command line is certainly good for such cases. That not withstanding, having an Igor option to load with concatenation would surely also be useful.

--
J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAHuntsville

May 6, 2011 at 06:53 am - Permalink

Hello,

I am in a similar situation. Some of my waves are splitted across many dataset. But I've not tried to concatenate them. Every dataset's waves are stored in separate data folders, then I simply plot the splitted traces on the same graph (AppendToGraph). Provided that these waves have a Time Stamp which is not interrupted between one dataset to another, you get directly what you expect. Else, you should modify the timestamps. However, it depends on your personal requirements...

Best Regards

May 6, 2011 at 04:38 pm - Permalink

Hi,
I need a little bit of help in similar problem, I have a lot of waves and want to have them concatenated in one single wave. So for example I have wave1 to wave7, and want to get a waveX that contains the values from wave1 followed by the values from wave2 and so on.
Maybe I have'nt read well the manual or I'm thinking to complicate, but has anybody an idea how to do this easy?
Thank You for your help,
Chriss

May 9, 2011 at 06:21 am - Permalink

csuks wrote:
Hi,
I need a little bit of help in similar problem, I have a lot of waves and want to have them concatenated in one single wave. So for example I have wave1 to wave7, and want to get a waveX that contains the values from wave1 followed by the values from wave2 and so on.
Maybe I have'nt read well the manual or I'm thinking to complicate, but has anybody an idea how to do this easy?
Thank You for your help,
Chriss


Just use the Concatenate operation. Since you have a bunch of waves you'll want to use the version of the operation that takes a string containing a list of wave names to concatenate. Here's an example:
String listOfWaves = "wave1;wave2;wave3;wave4;wave5;wave6;wave7;"
Concatenate listOfWaves, newWave


You probably want to generate the value of the listOfWaves string within a loop instead of hard coding its value.

May 9, 2011 at 07:11 am - Permalink