Looking for File Parcer

[a4chitect]

you mean a tool able to parse text data into geometry?

[todd burch]

Can you be more specific? Is this on Windows? Once this text is parsed, what do you want to do with it?

[todd burch]

Any scripting language with Regular Expression (RE) support comes to mind, (Perl, Ruby, Python, VB) unless the format is so predictable that parsing based on column offsets and/or data attributes doesn't warrant RE use. I've done several tasks for myself and others using Ruby to perform such a task. The last one was for a telephone company in Oklahoma, parsing out records for a reverse-phone number lookup directory. (sorted on phone number, not last name).

Not sure what a .cdf is.

If you want to send me a complete sample, I can quote it for you.

[mozzie]

For "quick and dirty" stuff, there's a number of old command line utilities ... free.

I've used "gawk" with considerable success extracting data from various proprietary/COBOL datasets of 100,000s of lines. Its a really simple regular expression script language, well documented (O'Reilly or The AWK book http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html), available for Windows (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gawk.htm) Mac (http://gawk.darwinports.com/) etc.

It reads a line of text, does the parsing, writes it out. Fast.

If you have formatted printout type data then I've also had success with Monarch (but its expensive) http://www.datawatch.com/

Good luck

[AdamB]

Sure you could use grep, sed etc but wait, what if we had a scripting language in Sketchup that had good file reading capability, powerful regular expression matching, and a binding to the Sketchup geometry API etc.

I guess we can only hope.

Seriously, something like this works fine:

IO.foreach("my_inputfile.ext") { |aline|

        /^(\S*) ([^$]*)/.match(aline)
        verb = $1
        rest = $2
        case verb

        ....whatever you need to do here eg entities.add_face, entities.add_group etc
}

This is my mickey mouse .obj importer I use for Sketchup:

pos = []
tex = []
group = nil

IO.foreach("/tmp/test.obj") { |aline|

        /^(\S*) ([^$]*)/.match(aline)

        verb = $1
        rest = $2
        case verb
                when "s"
                        # ignore smoothing group
                when "v"
                        # close current group
                        if group
                                pos = []
                                tex = []
                                group = nil
                        end
                        / (\S*) (\S*) (\S*)/.match(rest)
                        pos.push Geom;;Point3d.new($1.to_f,$2.to_f,$3.to_f)
                when "f"
                        if /(\S*)\/(\S*) (\S*)\/(\S*) (\S*)\/(\S*)/.match(rest)
                                vertices = [pos[$1.to_i], pos[$3.to_i], pos[$5.to_i]]
                        elsif /(\S*) (\S*) (\S*)/.match(rest)
                                vertices = [pos[$1.to_i], pos[$2.to_i], pos[$3.to_i]]
                        end
                        group.entities.add_face vertices
                when "g"
                        # open a new group
                        /(\S*)/.match(rest)
                        group = Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_group
                        group.name = $1
                        puts "group(#{$1})"
        end
}

Adam