UNIX and Linux Applications

Hi,

I hope this is appropriate for this forum.

I have a text file (test.txt) that contains information that I would like to parse into an IDL procedure. Each line of the text file is either a number or a string, which will be a variable in my IDL procedure. Therefore I want to read each line of the text file and store it as a separate variable. I think I have figured out how to do that.

openr, lun, 'test.txt', /get_lun
readf, lun, IDL_var#
'' '' ''
'' '' ''
free_lun, lun

The above code works if the lines of the text file are numbers. If the line is a string then I must first have: IDL_var#=''. This has worked so far because I have constructed my text file so that the IDL code knows which lines will be numbers, and which will be strings.

Here are my questions:

- Is there a better way to parse info from a text file into an IDL procedure?
- IMPORTANT: I currently have a variable that I would like to pass into the IDL procedure which will either be a string or a number. How can I make readf function blind to this? I won't be able to tell it in advance the type of variable.

Thank you for any help,
Mike

Apparently no one understood your question. I myself don't know what you mean by IDL. The syntax you have in your example doesn't look like code I'm familiar with.

There are lots of tools in UNIX to parse stuff and extract info. The basics in increasing order of complexity and power are:
read (shell function)
I commend you to try again. Hopefully next time someone will pick up the thread.