From help-request at octave dot org Tue Mar  8 10:02:35 2005
Subject: Re: save function
From: Hamish Allan <hamish at frontcompany dot com>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Cc: Help-Octave List <help at octave dot org>, brumen@hispeed.ch,         Mike Miller <mbmiller@taxa.epi.umn.edu>,         Paul Kienzle <pkienzle@users.sourceforge.net>
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 09:41:27 -0600

On Mar 8, 2005, at 15:16, John W. Eaton wrote:

> I don't think we want -ascii2 to mean "do the Matlab-compatible -ascii
> thing" because it just trades one incompatibility for another.  If we
> want compatibility, then we have to make Octave's "save -ascii" do
> what Matlab's does.  That includes saving character strings as numeric
> data and allowing multiple values to be stored in a single file (with
> no header information that gives you a clue about what variables are
> where -- I guess when saving the entire workspace, the variables are
> stored in alphabetical order?) and so on.  We can still keep Octave's
> old -ascii behavior, but we will need rename the option.  As I noted
> in my previous message, this is likely to cause some pain.  How can we
> minimize it?

How about the following behaviour:

octave> a = [1 2 3];
octave> b = [4;5;6];
octave> save -ascii both a b
octave> save -ascii just_a a
octave> save -ascii just_b b
octave> save -headed-ascii headed_a a

$ cat both
# Created by Octave 2.1.64, Tue Mar 08 15:36:56 2005 GMT 
<hamish at taos dot local>
# name: a
# type: matrix
# rows: 1
# columns: 3
  1 2 3
# name: b
# type: matrix
# rows: 3
# columns: 1
  4
  5
  6

$ cat just_a
  1 2 3

$ cat just_b
  4
  5
  6

$ cat headed_a
# Created by Octave 2.1.64, Tue Mar 08 15:37:06 2005 GMT 
<hamish at taos dot local>
# name: a
# type: matrix
# rows: 1
# columns: 3
  1 2 3

In contrast, Matlab exhibits the following behaviour:

 >> save -ascii both a b
 >> load -ascii both
??? Error using ==> load
Number of columns on line 2 of ASCII file /Users/hamish/both
must be the same as previous lines.

$ cat both
    1.0000000e+00   2.0000000e+00   3.0000000e+00
    4.0000000e+00
    5.0000000e+00
    6.0000000e+00

Best wishes,
Hamish



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