[GRASS5] sites problem/bug?

[Eric G . Miller]

On Sun, Oct 08, 2000 at 03:18:18PM +0200, Andreas Lange wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> i have a problem with a sites file. I can import the file with grass4.3
> (and export and display it) with s.in.ascii, s.out.ascii and d.sites,
> but on grass 5.0 i get on importing or exporting a "WARNING: error
> scanning floating point attribute" and the resulting sites file is
> empty.
> 
> The format is e. g.:
> 16.00000 45.800000 "String"
> -1.05000 41.667000 "String"
> ..
> 
> If i import with grass4.3 or write the format with the "|" separator
> myself with a perl program, s.out.ascii and d.sites work within
> grass5.0beta. 
> 
> I am getting mad about those inconsistencies with the sites format. I
> consider this as a very annoying bug, but if someone knows a workaround,
> please tell me.

Yes, s.in.ascii is still buggy.  I did some small patches to it, but
it's still buggy.  I don't think I can really fix this without rewriting
the program.  I think the parsing makes too many assumptions about the
input.  Also, I did notice the grassprogman.pdf says, unprefixed
attributes should be treated as strings, but s.in.ascii tries to import
them as doubles.  It still seems buggy about whether there is a cat
number or not.  Best bet, for the moment, make sure all entries have a
cat number and all attributes are prefixed with either an '@' for
string, or an '%' for numeric. 

Since I've gotten rather familiar with site_list processing lately, I
could change the behavior to default to string attributes rather than
doubles and generally rewrite the module.  Or be even slicker, try to
convert unknown attributes to doubles, and if it fails, save them as
strings.

In the future, I hope to see sites go away completely in favor of
attribute tables associated with vector objects (area, line, node,...).

<example sites that will work>

GRASS:~ > s.in.ascii d=2 sites=site1 
23.0098 34.123 #1 %99 @"My big long string"
end

GRASS:~ > s.in.ascii d=2 sites=site3
303.999 12345.09 #5 909.99
end

</example>

<example sites that fail>

GRASS:~ > s.in.ascii d=3 sites=site2 
-120.098 33.987 23.45 %99.88
end

GRASS:~ > s.in.ascii d=2 sites=site4
900.234 67.34 #1 "my string"
end

</example>


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