[Gretl-devel] Re: mread possible enhancement

Am 19.05.2019 um 12:21 schrieb Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti: > On Sat, 18 May 2019, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote: > >> Answering myself: I put together a smal hansl function for doing just >> that: it should work on reasonably regular csv files. It's reported >> below (together with a small example): what do you guys think about >> adding it to the extra package? > > Ok, I'm populating this thread all by myself, but IMO I have something > worth looking at. Attached you'll find a file with the functions and a > sample script. I believe this is a useful addition; if nobody objects, > I'm going to upload for moderation a new version of extra.gfn that > contains the new function tomorrow or Tuesday at the latest. Hi Jack, sorry for the delay, I know the feeling of being alone in a thread ;-) Coming back to your original post, indeed I think it would make sense to extend the built-in mread() function. In that sense it's not clear to me that putting something like this into extra would be the best solution. Related remark: Gretl already has a lot of heuristics of dealing with csv files, which is used by the 'open' command. So basically reading in a matrix from a csv file should be similar to doing: clear -> open thisfile.csv - matrix m = {dataset}. Of course you don't want to ditch the old dataset in place and start a new session, so this is not totally equivalent. But perhaps internally in an extended mread() function the existing backend C code could be reused.