Re: [Gnuplot-bugs] Gnuplot 4.0 Win32 crashes on plot from file

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, Uwe Zimmermann wrote:

[...]
> plot          \
>      '030910alogg.csv' \
>         every 1:::0::0 \
>         using ($1<4700? $1/60.0-60.0:1/0):($2) \
>           '"%*[^"]",%lf,%lf,"%*[^"]",%lf,%lf,"%*[^"]",%lf,%lf'\

That's 6 %lf specifiers...

> but adding another column to the format specifier crashes Gnuplot on
> Win32 (WinXP sp1+updates):
[...]
>    "%*[^"]",%lf,%lf,"%*[^"]",%lf,%lf,"%*[^"]",%lf,%lf,"%*[^"]",%lf,%lf'\

Now it's 8 %lf specifiers, and that's the cause of the problem.  None of
gnuplot's plot styles uses more than 7 'using' specifiers, so the format
string isn't expected to contain more than 7 instances of %lf.  You should
replace the %lf for those columns you aren't going to actually use by
%*lf, which parses a number but then ignores it.

So the real bugs are two-fold: this limitation should be documented in
'help using', and exceeding the limit should yield an error message rather
than crash gnuplot.  I'll see how this can be fixed.

> Earlier I was able to plot this same datafile with GnuPlot 3.7x where
> the column separator could be redefined to be a comma instead of a
> whitespace...

You're mixing up versions here, I think.  I'm quite positive none of the
officially released 3.7x versions had such an option; i.e. yours must have
been a modified one.  gnuplot 4.0, OTOH, does have this option.  See "help
separator".

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.