As a slight optimization, you could note that string works by creating an IOBuffer and printing the arguments into it, and then converting the result to a string. Thus, you could skip the extra conversion to a string and back by making the IOBuffer directly.
On Tuesday, August 12, 2014, Iain Dunning <iaindunn...@gmail.com> wrote: > No need for macros! > Its an interesting feature request, maybe open a Github issue so people > can discuss it. > > I think your solution is not terrible, you could generalize it to > > readcell(f, nlines) = readdlm(IOBuffer(string([readline(f) for i in > 1:nlines]))) > > Then do something like > > f = open("mydata","r") > cells = {} > while !eof(f) > push!(cells, readcell(f, 3)) > end > close(f) > > > > On Tuesday, August 12, 2014 10:40:24 AM UTC-4, Jarvist Moore Frost wrote: >> >> I’m writing a Julia parser to read in a large output from a Fortran >> program which is essentially a load of concatenated matrices of differing >> dimensions. It would be really useful to be able to do something along the >> lines of readdlm(file,nlines=3) to pull in i.e. the 3x3 matrix you know >> that follows. >> >> Currently I’m resorting to things like: >> >> celltext=string(readline(f),readline(f),readline(f)) >> cell=readdlm(IOBuffer(celltext)) >> >> And this really doesn’t feel like a very elegant method (not helped as >> neither readline nor readlines appear to accept ‘number of lines’ as an >> argument). >> >> Am I missing the Julia way to do things here? Or should I start writing >> @macros to expand to this level of nitty gritty? >> >> >