READ: Read the Next Line of an ASCII Text File

READ will read the next line of the named opened file (the argument of READ is the logical name of a file previously opened with OPEN). This line then becomes the 'current' line for the file and all subsequent references to the file in arithmetic expressions use the current line. Each READ causes a new line to be read in the order in which they appear in the file. However, it is possible to skip specified lines in the file using the SKIP command. The following example shows how to use the OPEN, and READ commands in conjunction with arithmetic expressions.

Suppose you have a file called photometry.dat containing the following four lines of data:

     B      V
   100.5  150.3
   110.4  164.9
    75.3  113.6

We could compute B-V using the following simple procedure.

    OPEN PHOT photometry.dat
    SKIP PHOT 1
    DO I=1,3
       READ PHOT
       BV=2.5*(LOG10{[@PHOT.1]}-LOG10{[@PHOT.2]})
       PRINTF '%I2 %F10.3' I BV
    END_DO
    END

The first line opens the file and gives it the name PHOT. Since the first line of the file does not contain numeric data and is just a header for the columns of data, we use the SKIP command to label line 1 as a line to be skipped. We then begin to read the real data. The first time line 4 is executed it reads line 1 of the file. It finds that we have marked line 1 as a line to skip so it then reads the next line.

Line 5 then makes two references to the file. The construction @PHOT.1 is interpreted in the following way: In the 'current' line of PHOT (the one we just got with the READ), extract the first word of the line and convert it into a numeric value. And, of course, @PHOT.2 refers to the second word on the current line. The 'word' indicator can be either a constant as shown or it can be a variable. So if B=1 and V=2 we could have said @PHOT.B and @PHOT.V. Expressions are not allowed: @PHOT.(B+1) is illegal and @PHOT.B+1 means "add 1 to the value of @PHOT.B".

Implicit READing: String substitutions, using the string_name construction, can also substitute lines from an opened file. To do so use the form logical_name, which does an implied READ of the named file and substitutes the entire line from the file into the command line. You can also substitute particular words using the form logical_name.word_indicator where the word indicator is an expression giving the word number. These substitutions always do a new implicit READ for each substitution. The following example shows how to use these implied READ string substitutions.

In this procedure, the user is asked to give a filename. The file contains a list of disk file names for images which are to be processed in some standard way. The processed image is written out with the same name. There is one disk file name per line.

    STRING FILE '?Enter image name file. >> ' ! Get image name file
    OPEN IMAGES {FILE}  ! Open the name file
    STAT LINES=COUNT{[IMAGES]}  ! Get number of lines in file
    DO I=1,LINES  ! For each image ...
       STRING DISKIM {IMAGES}  ! Get image name from file
       RD 1 {DISKIM}                         ! Read image
       CALL PROCESS                          ! Process it
       WD 1 {DISKIM}                         ! Write out
    END_DO
    END