[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.
(BTW, my hunch is that you really have a dataset in a csv file and you
want to sidestep gretl's dataset objects [series etc.] and instead want
to go straight into a data-matrix context. Am I right?]
cheers
sven