[Scilab-users] parsing TSV (or CSV) file with scilab is a nightmare

[Antoine Monmayrant]

Hi all,


This is both a rant and desperate cry for help.
I'm trying to parse some TSV data (tab separated data file) with scilab 
and I cannot find a way to navigate around the minefield of bugs present 
in meof/mgetl/mgetstr/csvRead.

A bit of context: I need to load into scilab data generated by a closed 
source software.
The data is in the form of many TSV files (that I cannot share in full, 
just some redacted bits) with a header and a footer.
I don't want to hand modify these files or edit them in any way (I need 
to keep this as portable as possible, so no sed/awk/grep...)


    OPTION 1: csvRead

That's the most intuitive solution, however, because of 
http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16391 and the presence of 
more than 1 empty line in my header/footer, this crashes Scilab.


    OPTION 2: hand parsing line by line using mgetl/meof

I tried:

filename="tsv.txt";
[fd, err] = mopen(filename, 'rt');
while ~meof(fd) do
     txtline=mgetl(fd,1);
end
mclose(fd)

Saddly, and contrary to what's written in "help mgetl", meof keeps on 
returning 0, well passed the end of the file and the while never ends!


    OPTION 3: hand parsing chunk by chunk using mgetstr/meof

"help meof" does not confirm that meof should work with mgetl, but 
mgetstr is specifically listed.
I thus tried:

filename="tsv.txt";
[fd, err] = mopen(filename, 'rt');
while ~meof(fd) do
     txtchunk=mgetstr(80,fd);
end
mclose(fd)

But thanks to http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16419 this is 
also crashing Scilab.


    OPTION 4: Can anyone here help me with this?

I am really running out of ideas.
Did I miss some -hmm- obvious combination of available file parsing 
scilab functions to achieve my goal?
I have the feeling that it would have been faster for me to just learn a 
totally new language that does not suck at parsing files than trying to 
get it to work with scilab....


Antoine

(depressed)



http://bugzilla.scilab.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16419

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