Octave ascii file formats

[John W. Eaton]

On 24-Jun-2003, Jarle Snertingdalen <address@hidden> wrote:

| I'm currently developing a file reader for reading Octave ascii files. My
| problem is that I can't find any thorough specification for the various
| data formats delivered by Octave. We have implemented support for the
| types "matrix", "scalar" and "string". Do any of you know where I can find
| solid documentation regarding this problem?

Are you implmenting this from scratch?  If so, why?  Octave (in
src/load-save.cc) already has code for reading and writing this format
that could serve as a pretty good starting point even if you could not
use the code as it is.  There are some comments along with the code
that describe some details of the format, plus the code that
precisely describes the format.

| A brief list of all types
| would also be helpful, and what functions within Octave that produce these
| very types.

Since Octave users can add new types to Octave, there is no way to
have a complete list of types.  Unfortunately, Octave does not handle
this very well because the code that defines a new type does not include
any way to save or load the new type.  We need a solution for this
problem but don't have one yet.

jwe



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