Re: tabs vs. spaces with asciiread

On Dec 7, 2009, at 3:03 PM, Jonathan Vigh wrote:

> 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?).

Hi Jonathan,

emacs has a command called 'untabify' that changes tabs into the right
number of spaces.
If you have never used it, you could try:

emacs <filename>
<control> spacebar # sets the mark at the top of the file
<ESC> <shift> > # that is the 'greater than symbol --
moves to the end of the file.
<ESC> x untabify # executes the untabify command on the
region (in this case the whole file)

Note that by default emacs assumes a tab stop of 8, so if you are
using something else you need to change the emacs default.
Hope this helps.
  -dave

> 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 15:56:08 2009