Re: [Gretl-users] 'store' issues
Allin Cottrell schrieb:
On Sat, 16 Dec 2006, Sven Schreiber wrote:
> Allin Cottrell schrieb:
>> On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>
>> The notion is that "store" is an "expert" command: the
filename used is
>> exactly what you type on the command line, so if it's not an absolute
>> path it goes into the present working directory. This should be
>> documented, no doubt.
> Or related to that: How can I find out in a script where the
user
> directory (which is set in gretl's preferences) is to use that value?
Urgh. Why do you need that? I suppose it could be exported to the
environment if need be, but right now there's no way to do that, unless
perhaps by clever use of the "!" shell command.
Well if 'store' is expert-ish, then it needs some expert information ;-)
Anyway, I would prefer if 'store' simply uses the gretl preference
setting of the user directory. At least that is what I expected first.
Now everything is clobbering the top level of my home dir. But creating
directories in a gretl script would only work via the shell AFAICS, and
that means cross-platform problems. I mean the only change would be the
point of reference for relative paths, now it's externally determined,
and it would become gretl-determined. I think the latter is better.
<snip>
> All this makes parsing gretl's csv files error-prone IMHO. I propose
> to do one of the following two things: Either enclose _all_ strings in
> double quotes, and have the enclosed-but-leading single quote for all
> date values; (X)OR remove _all_ quotes, and change the separator ':'
> to 'M', 'W', 'D' according to the data frequency, in analogy
to the
> 'Q' for quarterly data. What do you think?
Sounds reasonable. One consideration is the possibility of
"round-tripping". That is, ideally if you export gretl data to CSV then
read them back into gretl, the time-series information should be
preserved. I'm not sure if that's the case at present, but it's
something I've thought of (at least intermittently) when messing with
the exporter/importer code.
Well for monthly and weekly I think replacing the ':' by 'M' and
'W'
would help here. For higher frequencies it's probably more complicated.
Anyway, I would welcome it if gretl's csv export could become a little
more consistent in the future.
Btw, the background for all this is that I want to manage data in gretl
and then pass them to specialized python programs via temporary csv
files that are created in gretl scripts; these scripts then invoke the
python programs via the shell ('!' command). Actually I would like to
wrap those things in a fancy function package, but I found out that one
cannot use '!' in a function apparently. (Same for 'include'.) Could
that restriction be lifted?
(And if you wonder why I'm not simply doing everything in a gretl
script, the main reason is lack of object-orientation there.)
<snip>
One possibility I've had in mind for a while is merging
everything under
"open" (scrap the "import" command and associated menu items).
Unfortunately, other issues (such as implementing Arellano-Bond or
fixing the behaviour of sub-sampling commands within user-defined
functions) have got in the way ;-)
of course it's not high priority, but it seems like a good idea to me.
Thanks for listening,
Sven