#238 PLY import under ubuntu error

[Anonymous]

If I import PLY-files under Ubuntu I get following error:
While opening: '/home/noel2/bin/RGBDemo0.4/current_mesh.ply'
Error encountered while loading file:
"/home/...../bin/RGBDemo0.4/current_mesh.ply"
Error details: Unespected eof

I had this problem under Meshlab 1.22, 1.23 and 1.3 (Ubuntu-packages and self-compiled)

The file working fine with meshlab under windows and are point clouds, surfels or triangles from:
http://nicolas.burrus.name/index.php/Research/KinectRgbDemoV4#tocLink2

Please help. Thanks.

[Paolo Cignoni]

Can you provide the offending ply file?
on my ubuntu machine ply importing works fine...

cheeers
P.

[Anonymous]

My files are a little bit large but it also happen with the "bunny":
ftp://graphics.stanford.edu/pub/3Dscanrep/bunny.tar.gz

On the console get additionally following message:
LOG: 0 Warning: Mesh /home/noel2/Downloads/bunny/data/bun090.ply has not been opened
LOG: 0 All files opened in 1374 msec

And I can also say that it happen on 3 installations on 2 different computers.

[Luka Frelih]

This issue is real and happens because of incorrectly locale-aware number parsing. I can confirm it for Ubuntu and Debian 1.2 and 1.3 versions.

The "unespected eof" - happy misspelling :) comes from import_ply.h, the loop reading vertices (in my case) failing when for first data row the Read() returns -1, because the decimal dot does not parse as number when decimal comma is specified in the locale.

My locale is Slovenian, but I guess most european locales will fail here.

Work-around is to call meshlab with LANG=C, i guess, or convert files to use commas in the data rows.

Fixing this comes down to adjusting the ply code in vcg library to not use locale-aware parsing. Should not be too hard?

[Luka Frelih]

Hello again, I managed to fix this by setting numeric locale to C in main.cpp of meshlab.
Please see the diff below, could not figure out how to attach it to the bug.

There is similar code already in meshlabplugins/filter_plymc/plymc_main.cpp but it doesn't take effect in meshlab.

diff --git a/meshlab/src/meshlab/main.cpp b/meshlab/src/meshlab/main.cpp
index 6a74830..1fd1c18 100644
--- a/meshlab/src/meshlab/main.cpp
+++ b/meshlab/src/meshlab/main.cpp
@@ -25,12 +25,16 @@
#include <qmessagebox>
#include "mainwindow.h"</qmessagebox>

+using namespace std;
+
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
QApplication app(argc, argv);
QLocale::setDefault(QLocale::C);
QCoreApplication::setOrganizationName("VCG");
QCoreApplication::setApplicationName("MeshLab");
+

• std::setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "C");

  if(argc>1)  
  {
  

[Felix Krull]

It is an old bug with an easy solution, but I can confirm it under Ubuntu 12.12, meshlab 1.3.0a and 1.3.3.
1.3.3 I installed from a dubious launchpad file to get rid of the bug, but no success. export LANG=C helps.

[TRUONG Ngoc Tuan]

The problem properly in these cases, not sure which one make the error:

• not save in ANSCII
• not \r\n window ending format (normally linux use \n) (I used notepad++ based on Wine to check)
• there are some comments like this: element vertex 8 { define "vertex" element, 8 of them in file }

so, just try to fix them all!

you can use some standard .ply file in this site to test your meshlab
http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/ply/

I confirmed with meshlab version 1.3.2 I just downloaded today (14 - Jan - 2014) (self-compile), it works fine with ubuntu 12.04

[bluedxca93]

seq 0.1 1

if it points out 0,1 run
sed 's#.#,#g' yourfile.ply >> temp.ply
meshlab temp.ply