Editing Guide to madagascar programs (section)

==sfcsv2rsf==
{| class="wikitable" align="center" cellspacing="0" border="1"
! colspan="4" style="background:#ffdead;" | Convert a delimited-text ASCII file to RSF binary floating point or int.
|-
! colspan="4" | sfcsv2rsf help=n delimiter=, dtype=float verb=n debug=n trunc=n o1=0. o2=0. d1=1. d2=1. unit1=unknown unit2=unknown label1=unknown label2=unknown
|-
|  colspan="4" | Zeros will be added if number of elements is not the same in each row.<br>n1 and n2 are computed automatically. For consistency with sfdisfil and <br>sfmatmult, output is C-style order (row-first), i.e. rows in input file <br>become dimension-1 columns in output. Output encoding is native.
|-
| ''float  '' || '''d1=1.''' ||   || 
|-
| ''float  '' || '''d2=1.''' ||   || 
|-
| ''bool   '' || '''debug=n''' ||  [y/n] || 	Extra verbosity for debugging
|-
| ''string '' || '''delimiter=,''' ||   || 	Separator between values in input file
|-
| ''string '' || '''dtype=float''' ||   || 	Input type
|-
| ''bool   '' || '''help=n''' ||  [y/n] || 
|-
| ''string '' || '''label1=unknown''' ||   || 
|-
| ''string '' || '''label2=unknown''' ||   || 
|-
| ''float  '' || '''o1=0.''' ||   || 
|-
| ''float  '' || '''o2=0.''' ||   || 
|-
| ''bool   '' || '''trunc=n''' ||  [y/n] || 	Truncate or add zeros if nr elems in rows differs
|-
| ''string '' || '''unit1=unknown''' ||   || 
|-
| ''string '' || '''unit2=unknown''' ||   || 
|-
| ''bool   '' || '''verb=n''' ||  [y/n] || 	Whether to echo n1, n2, infill/truncation
|}

A small usage example follows below. First, create an input file:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
$ echo -e '5,6,8,9.2\n11,124,5,0,1' | tee file.csv
5,6,8,9.2
11,124,5,0,1
</syntaxhighlight>

You may notice that the number of values in each row is different.

Run <tt>sfcsv2rsf</tt>. Notice that no options are needed. By default, zeros will be appended to make the rows equal in length:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
$ <file.csv sfcsv2rsf > junk.rsf ; sfdisfil < junk.rsf 
   0:             5            6            8          9.2            0
   5:            11          124            5            0            1
</syntaxhighlight>

Notice that sfdisfil displays in column order (i.e. matrix is transposed if the number of rows is right). The dimensions of the file are transposed on disk:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
$ sfin junk.rsf
junk.rsf:
    in="/data/path/junk.rsf@"
    esize=4 type=float form=native 
    n1=5           d1=1           o1=0          unit1="unknown" 
    n2=2           d2=1           o2=0          unit2="unknown" 
	10 elements 40 bytes
</syntaxhighlight>

Depending on your needs, you may want to run the output through <tt>sftransp</tt>. However, if creating an input for <tt>sfmatmult</tt>, this will not be necessary, because <tt>sfmatmult</tt> is made to work with matrices that are displayed with <tt>sfdisfil</tt>, and takes as input a transpose matrix.

Pipes can be used, of course, to skip the creation of intermediary files:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
$ <file.csv sfcsv2rsf | sfdisfil
   0:             5            6            8          9.2            0
   5:            11          124            5            0            1
</syntaxhighlight>

Note that since this program does not need any arguments (just stdin and stdout), it will not display the man page when called with no arguments. In order to consult the automatically generated documentation, you need to pass the option <tt>help=y</tt> .