[pdal] reader text file

[Howard Butler]

> On Nov 25, 2015, at 6:29 PM, Jed Frechette <jedfrechette at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> +1 for a text file reader. As much as I hate them, dealing with text files is one of the main things that keeps me from using PDAL as much as I would like.
> 
> For the interface it seems like just mirroring the writers.text Options would be a good start. On top of that being able to skip a certain number of header lines and set a spatialreference would also be great.

I think I may take a crack at this in a slightly unconventional way -- I will implement a readers.python. The idea would be that you write a python script that turns your text file, whatever it is, into a numpy array, and then we'll just suck in that numpy array into PDAL with the types that are specified. 

For simple formats, the Python script will be super simple, and for complex stuff, well, PDAL doesn't have to be responsible for it ;)

I can see this having other uses too. It doesn't mean there won't ever be a readers.text that is dedicated, but it should give us a stopgap in the interim.

Howard