Re: Textscan and csv fitness data problem

[Philip Nienhuis]

Ben Abbott wrote:
> > On Jan 3, 2018, at 2:47 PM, Philip Nienhuis <address@hidden
> > <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
> >
> > Sure, I sympathize with your (and probably anyone else's) expectation.
> > But csv2cell isn't so flexible yet.
>
> I don’t know if it breaks something, but I commented out the two
> if/error blocks that check for columns that are too short or too long,
> and was able to read the file.

Looking at the code I think you run little risk there.

To be honest, I or rather the io package inherited csv2cell and its 
siblings cell2csv etc. from the old "general" (or was it the 
"miscellaneous" package) and I never bothered much about it save for 
some obvious and annoying bugs.
Only recently, looking better at it, I realize a few -in hindsight- 
suboptimal choices have been implemented by the original author (who 
seems to have vanished from the face of the earth).

csv2cell is a lot more flexible than csvread and dlmread and only a 
little bit slower, so IMO it deserves more attention.

> But, perhaps a better solution is to assume the 1st row contains all
> intended columns.

Sure but I have several csv files where that isn't the case.
Yet this solution is probably the most practical one. If no range is 
supplied csv2cell could supply a warning (instead of an error) if one or 
more lines contain more fields than the first line, along the lines you 
suggested in an earlier post. I think that would be easy to implement 
and would also allow some code cleanup.

Philip