Input line too long???

[David Bowman <bowman(at)ipgp.jussieu.fr>]

Greetings all,

I have a data file that essentially contains a very long vector of
floating point numbers.  The file (written by a trusty old FORTRAN
program) gives the number of elements in the record on the first line. 
The second line contains all the data, with each element separated by
two spaces.  For example:

  .123348  .126664  .130130  .133735  .137486   and so on.

Now in the past I've read this data with no problem simply using

x=fltarr(n)
readf,1,x,format='(nF0)'

where n is the number of elements in the vector.  However, I've
recently tried to read in a much larger vector, and IDL chokes, saying:

% Input line is too long for input buffer of 32767 characters.

The datafile in question contains 5856 elements (five of which are in
my little example above). All told, there are 55278 characters in the
line in question.

Nothing I've tried works...  Reading in elements by element, with
formatting, without formatting...  I've even tried using the BUFSIZE
keyword to OPEN, with no result.  The IDL help says that I'm limited to
reading in files smaller than 2^31 bytes, but I'm certainly well below
that.  

I'd love to simply rewrite the I/O section of the program that made the
file to begin with, but I didn't write it and I don't have the source
code.

Any Ideas?  I'm using version 5.3 on a Mac G3 with 128 Mb RAM.  

Thanks in advance...
David

-- 
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David Bowman         "Smash forehead on keyboard to continue."
Laboratoire Tectonique
Institut de Physique du Globe - Paris
4 Place Jussieu
75252 Paris Cedex 05
France