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

[CHEZE David 227480]

Hi Antoine,



did you also look at fscanfMat ? It's handy when  space or tab separators.



regards,



David

________________________________
De : users [users-bounces at lists.scilab.org] de la part de Antoine Monmayrant [antoine.monmayrant at laas.fr]
Envoyé : lundi 27 avril 2020 17:40
À : Users mailing list for Scilab
Objet : [Scilab-users] parsing TSV (or CSV) file with scilab is a nightmare


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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