On Wed, 27 Sep 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote: I can see a case for a simple additional column, say "dimension", which could have, for example, "n = 1200" for a cross-sectional dataset, "T = 96" for time-series, or "N = 20, T = 30" for a panel. Here's a fairly simple rainy-day task for somebody: go through the supplied data files (maybe in the first instance just the ones under the "Gretl" tab) and compose a little text file on the same format as the existing "descriptions" file, so for instance: "abdata","N = 140, T = 9" "anscombe","n = 11" "arma","T = 624" ... If anyone does that, I'll be happy to arrange for it to be picked up in the same way as the current "descriptions" file and displayed in the GUI. I'm aware that we _could_ read that info automatically from the gdt files, but in the interest of responsiveness I think I'd rather not (gunzip and) parse a bunch of XML files on the user's accessing a tab in the data browser -- though I suppose that might be worth the experiment (how long does it really take?). Downside for me: I would have to code that experiment! Allin

Am 29.09.2017 um 18:56 schrieb Sven Schreiber: I have started an attempt, attached, but: CAUTION, this produces a crash for me (with the latest Windows snapshot which I've just downloaded). The crash doesn't seem to happen every time, but with a freshly started gretl instance just now it did. When there's no crash, there seems to happen some weird over-/underflow error in the N variable (which by construction should actually be an integer). thanks, sven

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote: Thanks for both the idea and the crash report. The crash was due to a remaining window of vulnerability created by our acceptance of the "open" command in loops (something that was was disallowed until relatively recently). I've now closed that window in git, so your script should now run OK. However, the task that your script addresses is easier than you make it, due to the presence of the $datatype accessor. Given an array of datafile names "fnames", the following will suffice: <hansl> string out = "" loop i=1..nelem(fnames) --quiet string tempstr = fnames[i] printf "Opening %s\n", tempstr catch open @tempstr --preserve --quiet if $error printf "Couldn't open %s\n", tempstr break endif if $datatype == 1 # cross section out ~= sprintf("\"%s\",\"n = %d\"\n", tempstr, $nobs) elif $datatype == 2 # time series out ~= sprintf("\"%s\",\"T = %d\"\n", tempstr, $nobs) elif $datatype == 3 # panel N = max($obsmajor) T = max($obsminor) out ~= sprintf("\"%s\",\"N = %d, T = %d\"\n", tempstr, N, T) else # weird error printf "Got no recognized data!?" break endif endloop print out </hansl> Note also that you can't use "temp" as a string (filename) in such a script without generating confusion, since at least one of the packaged datafiles contains a series named "temp". Allin

Am 02.10.2017 um 16:38 schrieb Sven Schreiber: Using the $datatype variant this works fine now -- I guess you don't need the text file explicitly anymore, or should I send it? There's only one problem with the datafile data7-25 ("Congressional Elections..."), because it cannot be found, also with a manual GUI-based attempt. Is it missing in the install, or is the dataset list entry obsolete? thanks, sven