[Radiance-general] rtcontrib scripts

[Jack de Valpine]

Hi David,

I can think of a few things to consider:

   1. first off rather than using a big/huge data file to test your
      script, it would be much better to use a very small data set (10
      lines of data perhaps) that you can use to check that your script
      is working
   2. I am not sure that switching scripting languages is necessarily
      the best thing to do as this just means there is more to
      learn/control. Note though that the O'Reilly books on Perl and
      other languages are really good.
   3. perhaps there is a way to do what you want more simply (eg such as
      directly with rcalc), if you can give us more of an idea of what
      you are trying to do then you may get back some good suggestions
      for doing what you want. rcalc is the real radiance workhorse for
      processing data. The issue may be in figuring out how to code up
      you algorithm in radiance's native functional language.

-Jack

J. David Maino wrote:
> Jack,
>
> Actually, my knowledge of Perl is also rather limited, at least as far 
> as anything too complex goes, but file manipulations I can do just 
> fine. Mainly what I'm trying to do is just take a simple text file 
> that rtcontrib spits out and then manipulate that data. I'm not sure 
> if I'm just not parsing the data correctly or if the file is just too 
> large and my computer is dying trying to run my inefficient 
> algorithms, but Perl seems to be failing me for the moment. I'm sure 
> there are faster/easier ways to do this than what I'm currently 
> trying, but for now I'm kinda just sticking to what I know how to do. 
> Perhaps I will try Python though. Can anyone direct me to any good 
> books about programming with Python? Also, I will have to look into 
> trying to directly interface with rcalc as this sounds much easier and 
> much more efficient than all the intermediate steps I'm taking.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dave
>
> Jack de Valpine wrote:
>> Hi Dave,
>>
>> What kinds of problems are you having with Perl? You should be able 
>> to do most anything you want with Perl. The main problem area can be 
>> if you are feeding data to into and/or out of radiance programs and 
>> end up with buffering problems. For example I only recently learned 
>> that there is a '-u' switch for rcalc which causes output to be 
>> flushed after each record. This came in real handy for a perl program 
>> that uses open2 to both write to and read from an rcalc process.
>>
>> -Jack
>>
>> PS, as others on this list know I am a pretty strong advocate of 
>> Perl. However, there is also a strong group who use Python for 
>> Radiance related scripting. Of course Greg is all about shell.... 
>> Nevertheless, as you indicate fairly good knowledge of Perl this 
>> might still be the best place to try to get things working....
>>
>> J. David Maino wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Recently I've been playing around with rtcontrib for use on my 
>>> thesis and have been developing (or trying to rather) some scripts 
>>> to make data handling a bit easier. The problem is that my knowledge 
>>> of shell scripting is rather limited, and the only other programming 
>>> language I know fairly well (perl) is not wanting to cooperate. I'm 
>>> trying to automate the process of multiplying the luminance values 
>>> of the sky patches to the corresponding RGB values that rtcontrib 
>>> puts out so that I can get illuminance data for a whole slew of sky 
>>> conditions. Does anyone know of any scripts out there that might do 
>>> this, or what programming language might be best suited to dealing 
>>> with very large files (I have a lot of illuminance points)? Any help 
>>> you could offer would be greatly appreciated!
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Dave
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Radiance-general mailing list
>>> Radiance-general at radiance-online.org
>>> http://www.radiance-online.org/mailman/listinfo/radiance-general
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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>

-- 
# Jack de Valpine
# president
#
# visarc incorporated
# http://www.visarc.com
#
# channeling technology for superior design and construction

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