[opendx-users] Spaces in filenames (Mac)

[Chris Pelkie]

It took a while to deduce yesterday the reason that I was getting a really unhelpful error from Import:
"ERROR: Import: Internal error: unspecified error in Import"
in part because of embedded spaces in the path for a data file.
This path was embedded by Export (using "dx text 2" format) in a preprocessing operation that read in spreadsheet-like text files and output .dx and .data files, suitable for combining into a series. Then when trying to read the series into the viz net, Import refused due to the funky paths in the .dx files that pointed to the .data files.
Wrapping the path/filename in double quotes, or in single quotes, or escaping (\_) the spaces did not work. Deleting the paths within the .dx files worked, as did changing the Mac directory names to have no spaces, then rerunning Export to make new files with no spaces in paths.
But I LIKE spaces in paths! That's one of the thousand reasons Mac's are more useful computers than 8.3 braindead computers! They don't make me--the human master--think like a bloody computer!
This was on OpenDX version "4.2.0" built from the CVS recently on Mac OS X.

This leads to a feature request: can someone add an option to Export to suppress writing hard-coded paths? This creates a real hassle if you have to move the data files later. In the past, I've thrown together scripts to remove these paths, but wouldn't it be easier to just not write them in the first place?
Thanks.


_______________________________
Chris Pelkie
Scientific Visualization Producer
622 Rhodes Hall, Cornell Theory Center
Ithaca, NY 14853