[GRASSLIST:2089] Re: programming interface to GRASS

[Roger Bivand]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Robert Najlis wrote:

> Is there a way to run GRASS from within compiled code - such as
> Java,C/C++,Perl,Ruby,Python, etc.  At this point it seems that I could run
> a program from within the GRASS shell and interact with GRASS that way.
> However, I really want to use GRASS for its analytical abilities as part
> of a larger program, so I would like to have full control from that
> program, and not have to be within the GRASS shell environment.  I believe
> that ESRI has this capability through Microsoft COM objects. I would like
> this to be on a Unix machine though, so COM is out of the question.
> 
One example you might consider looking at is the R/GRASS interface for
reading GRASS raster and sites files into R - a statistics programming
language and writing them back out again - the current release is on
http://cran.r-project.org -> Package sources -> Devel -> 
GRASS_0.1-7.tar.gz. Reading the C code may give you a prototype for
getting the raster layers across the interface for the libgis.a
functions. You could also look at libgrass at 
http://gdal.velocet.ca/projects/grass/ for the same kinds of things. From
there on, you will be using system() a lot to run the GRASS analysis
programs, they are stand-alone within the GRASS environment, which just
means having specific environment variables correctly set.

Roger

-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 93 93
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no
and: Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of
Gdansk, al. Mar. J. Pilsudskiego 46, PL-81 378 Gdynia, Poland.