[Liblas-devel] Dealing with "bad" data

[Mateusz Loskot]

On 04/11/10 18:25, Mike Grant wrote:
> On 04/11/10 16:07, Howard Butler wrote:
>> This email asks what should be our default stance should be in the 
>> face of bad data.  Some things, like an invalid point count, are 
>> partially recoverable, but attempts to reconcile many other will 
>> often result in proliferating bad data.  Should we be hard asses 
>> and always throw an error?  Do our best to recover on a 
>> case-by-case basis?
> 
> I'd just throw an exception when a LAS file isn't standards
> compliant (+1 hard ass).

+1

> A separate tool can be written that catches these and tries to fix
> up files.  This keeps things clean and gives direct feedback on
> naughty LAS files.
> 
> If you want to include additional code to handle bad data, it would 
> be definitely be nice to be have a flag that enables or disables
> this behaviour (the strict/loose interpretation Mateusz suggests).

I think I misunderstood a bit the initial concept of separate tool.
I assume this tool would use the libLAS library with all the validation
and clean-up logic built-in.
Certainly, it would pollute the library implementation quite a lot.
So, I second the idea of separate tool with as much cleaning logic in it
as possible. As Howard mentioned, it would be based on custom
implementation of ReaderI interface.

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
Charter Member of OSGeo, http://osgeo.org
Member of ACCU, http://accu.org