trouble with s.in.ascii

[Markus Neteler]

Hi Roger, hi all,

using your comments and an internal format description I have
updated the man-page of s.in.ascii (for GRASS 5 beta9, on the server
(HTML) by tomorrow).

Thanks for the hint!

 Markus

On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 12:29:31PM -0400, LWA Albuquerque wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 18 Sep 2000 mlennert at club.worldonline.be wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have trouble trying to import a simple ascii site file (X Y) into Grass5b8.
> > Using s.in.ascii I always get the error message: "WARNING: error scanning
> > floating point attribute".
> >
> > What am I doing wrong ?
> 
> I'm new to Grass, and had the same problem the first time I tried using
> s.in.ascii (Grass 5beta7 compiled with EGCS 2.91.60 using glibc2).  If
> your problem has the same cause as mine, then there's a simple fix.  The
> manual page for s.in.ascii omits a fairly important detail of the ascii
> sites file format.  I think the format may be more completely documented
> elsewhere in the manual pages.  What follows I got from the source code.
> 
> Each line of the ascii input file should contain either two or three
> coordinates (x,y and optionally z) separated by a user-selectable
> field-delimiting character.  After the coordinates there are optional
> attribute fields separated from the coordinates and from each other with
> the same user-selectable field delimiter.
> 
> The attribute field may be a category number, a decimal value or a string.
> Category numbers must be preceded by the "#" character and string values
> must be preceded by the "@" character.  Floating point values may be
> preceded by the "%" character but if there is no "#" or "@" preceding the
> attribute then it is assumed to be a floating point value.  Also, string
> values that contain blanks must be quoted or the part of the string
> following the first blank will be parsed as a separate field, which may
> cause an error.
> 
> I received the error you describe by 1) not using the "@" symbol before a
> string attribute (causing it to be parsed as a floating point value) and
> 2) not quoting the string, causing the second and later words of the
> string to be parsed as separate fields.
> 
> I think the best way to avoid further problems with this would be to
> either include more complete description of the format in the manual page
> for s.in.ascii or to provide a reference in the s.in.ascii man page to the
> page that does contain the complete description.
> 
> As I said, I'm quite new at Grass so please correct me if I'm wrong.
> 
> 
> Roger Miller
> 

-- 
Dipl.-Geogr. Markus Neteler *  University of Hannover
Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology
Schneiderberg 50 * D-30167 Hannover * Germany
Tel: ++49-(0)511-762-4494  Fax: -3984