Am 18.01.2014 17:58, schrieb gregjohn:
> I work with a lot of generated CSV files.  I'm getting tired of all the mouse
> clicks required to import it into Excel, and into an intelligible graph.  I'd
> like to write my own povray file for graphing, perhaps one that is always
> perfect in "readability" no matter what render pixel size you pick.
>
> What's the quickest way of getting a CSV-formatted data file into povray?  (If I
> have to do even a small amount of editing of the CSV by hand, it ruins the
> benefit of the project.)

If the CSV data doesn't happen to contain trailing commas, you're out of 
luck with official POV-Ray.

If you do have trailing commas (or can arrange to add them 
automatically, using e.g. a unix call to sed), and also know how many 
items you'll have, the fastest way is probably to populate an array with 
the data using #include, then go on from there:

   #declare MyArray = array[Rows * Columns] {
     #include "MyData.csv"
   }

If you do have trailing commas but don't know how many items to read, 
you'll probably need to resort to #read.


If you don't have trailing commas, you might want to have a look 
UberPOV's plaintext reading feature, which allows you to #read arbitrary 
ASCII files line by line.

Maybe the quickest way to proceed from there is to write the lines right 
back into a temporary file with added trailing commas, and then either 
#include that file into an array (you can determine the number of items 
by counting the lines in the previous steps) or #read it as a CSV as 
outlined above.


(P.S.: Note that on-topic posts are off-topic in p.off-topic :-P)

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