tabs vs. spaces with asciiread

Hi NCL'ers,
    I have another ASCII reading question. I created a data file by hand
using nedit. This file has mixed type (strings, logicals, and
integers). My original plan was to use asciiread to read the file into
NCL by column position, converting the strings into the appropriate
type. Unfortunately, when I was creating the file I used both spaces and
tabs to align the columns, and it seems that asciiread is not seeing
things in the position they appear within nedit.

I'm wondering, first of all, if anyone knows a simple way to save such a
file to fix this (maybe in a different text editor?). Secondly, does
anyone have any ideas on an NCL workaround to read a file like this (a
short version of the file is attached). My idea to split the string into
tokens and parse each line individually runs into a problem because some
of the string fields already have spaces.

Please don't spend much time on this - I think I could fix the file by
hand in an hour or two (only a few hundred lines) - but I just wanted to
ask to see if anyone already knows a solution.

A question for the developers - Is tabs vs. spaces a known issue with
asciiread?

Thanks!
 Jonathan

 STORMID STORMNAME CASE TYPE 1ST AIRCRAFT EYE IR DATA USABLE IR EYE t_OPEN Tbmin t_CLOSED Tbmin t_FIRST_EYE Tbmin t_PERSISTENT Tbmin t_STRONG Tbmin DESCRIPTION AT AIRCRAFT EYE Tbmin FORMATION MORPHOLOGY
 ------- ------------ ------------------- ------------------- ------- ------ ------ ----------- ------ ------------ ----- ------------ ----- ------------ ----- ------------ ----- --------------------------- ----- --------------------
 AL142008 NANA no_aircraft_data XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX True True False
 AL152008 OMAR intermittant_failure 14 Oct 2008 / 19:53 True True True 200810140545 -90 200810140545 -90 200809160115 -90 200809160115 -90 Very strong, cold CDO with an embedded warm spot -90 Lots of deep convection with primary band to east, was being sheared from west at first - strong convection persisted near center and at one point formed a col-type warm open warm spot. A strong CDO to west started showing signs of rotation, then a prominent and occasional broad warm spot (but not enough delta T to consider this an eye by our definition) - it seems quite likely that this was the eye but it took quite a while before the delta T was enough to call this a true eye.
 AL162008 SIXTEEN no_attempt XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX True True False
 AL172008 PALOMA complete_success 06 Nov 2008 / 17:07 True True True 200811061515 -80 200811062315 -80 200811062315 -80 200811071725 -75 200811072325 -80 CDO with indentation and inner cold banding and warm spot. -80 Had lots of strong convection which died out somewhat near the center, then two very powerful cells fired off and merged into a CDO with some signs of rotation

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Received on Mon Dec 7 15:03:41 2009