"aload" hacking

Hey all,

I've been trying to import a *.csv file with the "aload" function from
Kurt Hornik's "octave-ci" package, which can be found at:

ftp://ftp.ci.tuwien.ac.at/pub/octave/octave-ci.tar.gz

as per:
http://octave.sourceforge.net/index.index.html
, under "File I/O -> Import/Export".

It took me a while, but I figured out that the following recipe
worked:

octave> regexp1 = ",/,0/g' | sed -e 's/^,/0,";
octave> x = aload("C_o.csv",Inf,Inf,",",regexp1);
octave> size(x)
ans =

  69  23

---

And my own visual inspection of the data shows it to be correct.

But, as you might see in my 'regexp1' string variable, I actually
'tricked' the "aload" function into doing more than a single pipe to
sed! The relevant code from aload.m, lines 75 to 77:

system (["cat ", filename, " | ", ...
          "egrep -ve \'", ignore_regexp, "\' | ", ...
	     "sed -e 's/", NA, "/g' > ", tmpfile]);

So 'NA' accepts arbitrary strings. This might potentially be
problematic, but I thought I'd bring it to eveyone's attention, if
just for the novelty. :-)

Thanks,

~Tomer



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