[Ifeffit] trying to start...

[Matt Newville]

Mauricio,

Bruce and Norbert gave good answers about why Ifeffit chokes on
this data, and what might be done about it.  One question for you
is: how are these data files normally read?  Does the beamline
provide some utilities for dealing with these?

Ifeffit's read_data() was meant to read ASCII columns of floating
point numbers only.  That's certainly limited.  It might be
remarkable that it's been good enough so far, or it might be that
enough beamline data is close enough to this format already.

I originally expected that either beamline-specific read_XXX()
commands would have to be added or that the front ends would have
to translate the data and not use read_data().  It's probably a
lot easier to do the translation in perl, awk, or any editor with
search-and-replace (you could just replace ':' and '/' with '0'
and read_data() would work) than write a specific routine in
Fortran to read this data.    I'd be willing to add other 
read_XXX() commands, but have not seen the need yet.

It's also possible to modify read_data() to ignore non-numerical
columns.  Do others have beamline data file formats that
Ifeffit/Athena has problems with that should be handled?


--Matt