[Ifeffit] Problem opening up project files

[Matt Newville]

Hi Bruce,

Was the problem an ifeffit problem --  truncating strings and then not
recognizing them??  If so, what happened?

> P.S. While I am at it, I'll look into the issue of non-ascii
> characters in filenames that Mingliang asked about earlier today.

I think this is an Ifeffit problem.  Well, you could change
directories before reading the file, or avoid read_data() all together
(which would help avoid problems of non-ASCII characters in the file
name itself or in the file contents).  But I think that if a Fortran
open is used, the problem is not easily solvable.

--Matt

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Bruce Ravel <bravel at bnl.gov> wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 January 2010 05:22:25 pm Lisa Van Loon wrote:
>> I am using Athena in Windows and I have been having trouble with some
>>  project files. I would like to determine the cause: after closing the
>>  original file I am unable to reopen the project file again properly. I
>>  have attached a file to demonstrate the problem (test1.prj) Saving
>>  different versions does not help. When I open the file, no spectrum is
>>  displayed. (If I click on a file during the importing then that spectrum
>>  will remain displayed). At the bottom the "removing background..." never
>>  says "done". It seems like everything is working except the graphing
>>  window. I haven't been able to determine what is different about this data
>>  from other data that opens without any problem.
>
> Lisa,
>
> Wow.  This was a tricky one.  I had to follow several false leads
> before actually figuring out the problem here.
>
> Here's the story:
>
> At one point in the process of importing data from a file, header
> lines get truncated to 256 characters if they are longer than that.
> Several of the header lines in your orginal data files (in a separate
> email, Lisa sent me the original data files) are longer than 256.
> That by itself is not a problem.  However, when some of these long
> header files were truncated, you had the misfortune of having the
> 256th character come after an open parens and before a close parens.
> This triggered a problem in Ifeffit that it has when it encounters an
> unmatched and unescaped open parens in a character string.
>
> Way back in the early days of Athena (maybe 6 years ago or more), this
> was a serious issue leading to all sorts of troubled and unhappy
> users.  I thought I had fixed the problem, but apparently I only fixed
> the most common examples of this problem.  Your specific data files
> represented an edge case that slipped through the cracks.
>
> Sigh.
>
> I now have things fixed.  Not only do your data files no longer lead
> to a project file displaying this problem, I even figured out a way to
> fix your broken project on the fly.
>
> Sadly, there is no work-around for you in Athena.  The only immediate
> solution is unpleasent -- you will have to edit each offending file by
> hand and remove the very long header lines.  Ick!
>
> I will build a new Windows executable soon which incorporates the fix
> and make it available to the automated updater.  However this will
> take a few days as I have another Athena improvement that needs to get
> written and tested before I make the release.  I am working on that
> right now, so I am hopeful that I'll have a new version by next week.
> I hope.
>
> Sorry for the hassle.  Thanks *very much* for complaining about it.
> As I have said many many times, the extent to which my programs are
> any good at all is a tribute to the kidn and helpful feedback that I
> have received from all the users.
>
> Regards,
> B
> --
>
>  Bruce Ravel  ------------------------------------ bravel at bnl.gov
>
>  National Institute of Standards and Technology
>  Synchrotron Methods Group at NSLS --- Beamlines U7A, X24A, X23A2
>  Building 535A
>  Upton NY, 11973
>
>  My homepage:    http://xafs.org/BruceRavel
>  EXAFS software: http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/
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