Paraview: single file format for time sequence of stl files? - surface

I have time sequence of .stl files of particular geometry. I usually load all the time sequence .stl files in paraview and it works. I would like to know if there is any input file format where one can write all the time sequence geometry data in a single file and load in Paraview instead of having too many files ? I know that one can concatenate .stl files, but then it will be treated as single geometry, not as a sequence.
Thanks for the help.

ParaView supports lots of file formats that supports time sequence.
I would suggest using pvd format, wich is a ParaView native format.
Note : there will still be multiple files in a folder, but you will be able to open all files directly by opening the .pvd file.

Related

How to insert a new DICOM attribute for MULTIPLE dicom files in a series in one go?

I have to insert two missing attributes in the DICOM headers of DICOM files in the entire series. The series has more than 100 files. Instead of processing the files one-by-one, is there a way in Python to batch process multiple files in a series in one go?
I could not find any resource for doing this except Sante DICOM which comes at a price
You can use dcmodify from the dcmtk to do that. See here: https://support.dcmtk.org/docs/dcmodify.html
It supports wildcards for filenames. It is not written in python, but you can use it as a self-contained "external" executable. And it is completely free including the possibility to modify its source code (C++)

Pig and sequence files

I need to write a script that loads a few sequence files and merges them to one big sequence file and stores the file. Problem is i could not find any store or load functions that deal with sequence file. I am lost on how to do this. Advice would be helpful.

How to put files inside files

MS Word's .docx files contain a bunch of .xml files.
Setup.exe files spit out hundreds of files that a program uses.
Zips, rars etc also hold lots of compressed stuff.
So how are they made? What does MS Word or another program that produces these files have to do to put files inside files?
When I looked this up I just got a bunch of results about compression, but let's say I wanted to make a program that 'wraps' files inside a file without making the final result any smaller. What would I even have to write?
I'm not asking/expecting any source code that does this, I just need a pointer. Is there something you think I'm misunderstanding based on what I've asked here?
Even a simple link to an article or some documentation would be greatly appreciated.
Ok, I'll just come up with some headers for ordinary files and write them along with the bytes of the actual files into one custom-defined file. You guys were very helpful, thank you!
Historically, Windows had a number of technologies to support solutions like this. These were often called Compound Files or Structured storage. However, I don't think the newer Office documents use these technologies. I think the Office file formats are similar to ZIP files with a different extensions. If you change a file with .docx extension to .zip and open it with your favorite compression tool, you'll see a bunch of folders and XML files.
Here are some links to descriptions of different file formats that create "files within files"
Zip file format
Compound File Binary Format (CFBF)
Structured Storage
Compound Document File Format
Office Open XML I: Exploring the Office Open XML Formats
At least on POSIX systems (e.g. Linux), a file is only a stream (i.e. a sequence) of bytes. And you can only grow (or shrink, i.e. truncate) it at the end - there is no way to insert bytes in the middle (without copying the rest).
You need some conventions, and some additional software, to handle it otherwise.
You might be interested in Sqlite, which gives you a library to handle some (e.g.) *.sqlite file as an SQL database
You could also use GDBM - a library giving you some indexed file abstraction.
libtar is a library to manipulate tar archives. See also tardy, a tar file postprocessor.

How to compare and find the differences between two XML files in cocoa?

This is a bit of a two part question, for working with 40mb xml files.
• What’s a reasonable size to store in memory for a program running continually in the background?
• How to find what has changed in an XML file.
So on the first read the XML is loaded into NSData, then uploaded to the server.
Now instead of uploading a 40mb XML every time it changes, I would prefer to upload a “delta” file containing only what has changed. The program would monitor the file for change, and activate when it’s been modified. From what I can see, I would need to parse an old version of the xml file and parse the modified xml file, then compare them? Is it unreasonable to store 80mb in memory like this every time the file is modified?. Now I’m assuming that this has to be done with a DOM parser because I can’t see how you could compare two files like that with a SAX parser since it only has part of the file stored?
I'm a newbie at this so any help would be appreciated!
To compare two files:
There are many ways to do, (As file is to be considered, I may not be correct):
sdiff file1.xml file2.xml A unix command
You can use this command with apple script.
-[NSFileManager contentsEqualAtPath:andPath:]
This method checks to see if two files at given path are the same file, then compares their size, and finally compares their contents.
For other part:
What size is considered for background process, I dont think so, for an application it matters. You can save these into temporary files. Even safari uses 130+ MB as you can easily check through Activity monitor.
NSXMLParser ended up being the most useful for this

Read file to variable in Visual Basic

I want to be able to put a file to a variable so I can interact with it. For example I could put a wav file into a variable and play it back without having to distribute the separate file. Is this possible for instance by using Base64. I have seen some Python programs for example that have images embedded in the code.
Yes, you could conceivably store the contents of a binary .wav file as a static, uuencoded text array.
Probably a better way to go about it would be to create a "resource" for your binary data:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xbx3z216.aspx