July 01, 2012

Reading from and writing to a file in Tcl

File handling operations like reading from and writing to a file in any programming language is one of the most commonly used operations.

Writing to a file in Tcl is straightforward. 
In this post, we will discuss two ways to read a file in Tcl:

Note that the text in black represents tcl commands. Text in red represents user-defined variables and comments are in blue.

  1. set in_file [open palindrome_in.csv r]          ## Opens the file palindrome_in.csv in read mode
    set out_file [open palindrome_out.csv w]    ## Opens the file palindrome_out.csv in write mode
    set data [read $in_file]                                   ## "data" now has contents of the input file
    set lines [split $data "\n"]                             ## "lines" now contain collection of lines
    foreach line $lines {                                     ## Reading each "line" from collection of "lines"
    <body of your proc>                                    ## Body of the proc
    }
    puts $out_file "xyz"                                       ## Printing the desired output in palindrome_out.csv
    close $out_file                                              ## Closing the output file
    close $in_file                                                 ## Closing the input file


    Note: Closing both the input and output files is important. If not done, your Tcl shell might return an error "too many open files". Or even worse, the output in the output file might get terminated pre-maturely.
  2. set in_file [open palindrome_in.csv r]            ## Opens the file palindrome_in.csv in read mode
    set out_file [open palindrome_out.csv w]      ## Opens the file palindrome_out.csv in write mode
    while { [gets $in_file line] >= 0 } {                   ## Note that here "line" is not a user-defined variable
    <
    body of your proc>                                       ## Body of the proc
    }
    puts $out_file "xyz"                                       ## Printing the desired output in palindrome_out.csv
    close $out_file                                              ## Closing the output file
    close $in_file                                                 ## Closing the input file
    What's the difference between the two? Well, not much, if the size of your input file in small. However, if it is a big file (for example: SDF files, where the file maybe as big as 1 GB!!), you might prefer using the second method.

    In the first method, the user-defined variable lines contain all the lines of the file in form of a collection. If file is too big, this collection would be too big and one variable will have to hold this fairly big data till your script is working. This might lead to "stack-overflow error".
    This problem is alleviated in the second way where you are reading each line on the go.

5 comments:

  1. Really nice article..and a great initiative..

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    Replies
    1. Thank you!!
      We would love you hear your feedbacks and suggestions.

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    2. Thanks for the articles. Was looking for more of scripting tutorials(Tcl/Perl) to learn more of it and use it in ICC.

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    3. Hi there. You are welcome! :)
      It would help me to know what exactly you're looking for. Since I write more about VLSI stuff, sharing tutorials of Tcl/Perl might just be beyond the actual intent and scope of this blog. I'll be happy to share some good docs that I use while writing my scripts. You can mail me at my.personal.log@gmail.com.

      Apart from this, I'd be grateful to have your feedbacks about the posts, puzzles, content and the entire blog in general.

      Thanks!

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