Re: 3*0.0 in FORMAT free I/O

[Fergus Gallagher <F.Gallagher(at)nerc.ac.uk>]

brooker@toka.ireq-ccfm.hydro.qc.ca wrote: 
>Folks, 
 
>I have an ASCII output file produced by a FORTRAN program running on one   
of 
>the Livermore CRAYs. The output was written with FREE FORMAT format. One   
of the 
>variables has 0.0 as the value for its first three elements. When you 
>look at the file at the appropriate place, instead of seeing "0.0, 0.0,   
0.0"  
>you see "3*0.0"     
> 
>Has anybody ever ran into this "*" format? 
> 
 
This is standard FORTRAN. 
 
You can even have a line like 
 
3*,4*2.0,4,5,6 
 
read(*) a ! with a(10) = real, say 
 
Then the first three elements of a will be left unchanged. 
  
The n* is called a "null input field": the above is equivalent to 
 
,,,2.0,2.0,2.0,4,5,6 
 
but IDL won't understand that either. 
 
If this is likely to be a common problem, perhaps you should write a PERL   
procedure to translate the data. 
 
 
Fergus 
 
 
--  
 
================================================= 
| Fergus Gallagher                              | 
| Remote Sensing Applications Development Unit  | 
| British National Space Centre                 | 
| Monks Wood                                    | 
| Huntingdon PE17 2LS / UK                      | 
|                                               | 
| F.Gallagher@nerc.ac.uk                        | 
| http://uh.nmt.ac.uk/bnsc/fgg.html             | 
=================================================