Re: load does load data in an unstructured manner

[Nicholas Jankowski]

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:09 AM, Doug Stewart <address@hidden> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:01 AM, Jonathan Camilleri <address@hidden> wrote:

I am still trying to figure out what the opts mean - see http://octave.sourceforge.net/octave/function/csvread.html, and do I need to install an additional package?

How do I check the packages I have please?

To answer some of your other questions:

PKG:

pkg is the package command.

>> pkg list

will show you everything installed. packages aren't loaded by default.

>> pkg load control

will load the control package

if you need to update to the latest version,

>> pkg update control

will fetch and update the package from the octave-forge repository

>> pkg update

will do so for all installed packages. Note: this can take some time with minimal screen output, except for warnings which are mostly inconsequential.

if you are running on Windows and don't see a lot of packages listed, you likely didn't run the build_packages script after installing. Navigate to the /octave/octave-4.0.0/src  folder, and run build_packages.m.  then run pkg update, as most of them are fairly out of date.

OPTS:

with respect to csvread and csvwrite, both of those functions just call the dlmread and dlmwrite and specify a comma delimiter (the dlm functions can have almost any delimiter).  So the dlm_opts are all of the same things that can get sent to those functions. you can type help dlmread and help dlmwrite to see how that works. dlm_opts would be everything after the SEP argument in dlmread and dlmwrite.

(i agree that this could be make a bit more clear in the help for csvread and write. I'll put in a bug report and suggest a patch to provide more info. I've seen other places in the help that could use some clarity, feel free to point them out so we can head off future confusion)

Nick J.