This is a two part question.
1) Is there any way to get a csv file of all the entity data, including xdata, for an autocad dwg, either using autocad or some other method?
2) Is there an easy way to parse a autocad dxf file to get the entity data into a csv file?
Unfortunately, neither approach provides an easy method, but it is possible with a little effort.
With a DWG file, the file itself is binary so your best bet would be to write a plugin or script to AutoCAD, using .NET or ObjectArx, but this may be a troublesome approach. AutoLISP would be easier, but I don't think you could output to a file.
Getting the enitity data out of a DXF would be significantly easier, since the DXF is primarily a text format. This would be possible with any programming language, but since there are many possible entities it would take some effort to handle all of the cases. The DXF reference is available at the AutoDESK website. XData is certainly also included in the DXF in a text format, so that shouldn't be a problem.
You can write output to a file using autolisp, even binary output with some slight of hand. However, writing dxf data to a csv file, with or without xdata, by either reading the data directly (in-situ) or by parsing a dxf file, is completely impractical, given the nature of dxf group codes and associated data. Perhaps the OP can identify what he wants to achieve, rather than specifying what appears to me to be an inappropriate format for the data.
Michael.
Related
With popular software packages, like Microsoft Word or Photoshop, we often have an option to save our progress as a "project" file and later can open that file to edit our works furthermore. This file often contains all the options and the progress that the user has made (i.e the essay you typed in Word).
So my question is, if I am doing a similar application that requires creating a similar "project" file, how should I go about this? My application is a scientific application, which means it required a lot of (multi-dimension) arrays. I understand there will be a lot of options to do this, but I would like to know the de facto way.
Here are some of the options I have outline out:
XML: Human readable. The size is too big and it's too much work to deal with arrays.
JSON: More popular/modern. Good with array.
Protocol Buffer: It is created by Google. Probably faster.
Database: Probably not a good use case since "project" files are most likely "temporary". Also, working with arrays is not very straight forward.
Creating your own binary format: Might be the most difficult solution for an inexperienced programmer like myself.
???
I would like to get some advice from you guys. Thank you :).
(Good question. :) Only some thoughts) I'd prefer text format for the main project file. You can make diffs and open and read and modify it easily. Large ascii or binary data can be stored as serialized data in external files or in a database like SQLite from where it can be easily accessed and processed through the application. The main project has links to the external data store. My advice for the main project file is a simple XML format that can easily be transformed to JSON format. A list of key value pairs (dict) is good for the beginning. value can be of basic datatype or be an array or dict. A complicated XML tree is not good. The key name can also help to describe and structure data. So i'd prefer key="rect.4711.pos.x" value="500" and not <rect id="4711"><pos><x>500</x>...</pos>.... Important aspect is that the project data is portable and self-contained, and the user can see the project as a single unit even if it is a directory on the file system, for this purpose supporting some kind of zipped format of project data is good.
Just a little question. I mean, JSON is so good in the Web developing. So I try to ask you which APP or software can revert IFC to JSON.
IFC is a schema built on top of STEP (ISO 10303) format, so thats what would need to be converted, not the IFC aspect. It would be quite trivial to convert STEP syntax to JSON, in fact there is something called IFCxml (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes#IFC/ifcXML_specifications. ISO 10303-28) which is IFC using XML syntax instead of STEP syntax any way (JSON and XML being somewhat similar in structure, there are many XML -> JSON converters out there).
However there would be no point as this would not change the fact that the IFC still needs to be processed (not just read) by a client with an understanding of the schema. In this regard it makes no difference what syntax is used as the power of the IFC comes from the higher level heirachy of the schema, not the syntax that is used.
It would probably have the same problems as XML for IFC, i.e huge files in comparison to STEP so probably wouldn't be popular, even if there were tools which could process the IFC entities in JSON format.
OK. Now I find it is a new data format named as ifcjson can deal with it.
It is a new schema, simpler than IFC-SPF and IFCXML.
So maybe we need not a convertor, a new format is also a good choice.
Linked data collections are usually given in RDF/XML, JSON-LD, or TTL format. Relatively large data dumps seem fairly difficult to process. What is a good way to convert an RDF/XML file to a TSV of triplets of linked data?
I've tried OpenRefine, which should handle this, but a 10GB file, (e.g. the person authority information from German National Library) is too difficult to process on a laptop with decent processing power.
Looking for software recommendations or some e.g. Python/R code to convert it. Thanks!
Try these:
Lobid GND API
http://lobid.org/gnd/api
Supports OpenRefine (see blogpost) and a variety of other queries. The data is hosted as JSON-LD (see context) in an elasticsearch cluster. The service offers a rich HTTP-API.
Use a Triple Store
Load the data to a triple store of your choice, e.g. rdf4j. Many triple stores provide some sort of CSV serialization. Together with SPARQL this could be worth a try.
Catmandu
http://librecat.org/Catmandu/
A strong perl based data toolkit that comes with a useful collection of ready-to-use transformation pipelines.
Metafacture
https://github.com/metafacture/metafacture-core/wiki
A Java-Toolkit to design transformation pipelines in Java.
You could use the ontology editor Protege: There, you can SPARQL the data according to your needs and save them as TSV file. It might be important, however, to configure the software beforehand in order to make the amounts of data manageable.
Canonical N-Triples may be already what you are after, as it is essentially a space-separated line-based format for RDF (you cannot naively split at space though, as you need to take care of literals, see below). Of the dataset you cited, many files are available as N-Triples. If not, use a parsing tool like rapper for the conversion to N-Triples, eg.
rapper -i turtle -o ntriples rdf-file-in-turtle-format.ttl > rdf-file-in-ntriples-format.nt
Typically, the n-triples exporters do not exploit all that is allowed in the specification regarding whitespace and use canonical n-triples. Hence, given a line in a canonical n-triples file such as:
<http://example.org/s> <http://example.org/p> "a literal" .
you can get CSV by replacing the first and the second space character of a line with a comma and remove everything after and including the last space character. As literals are the only RDF term where spaces are allowed, and as literals only allowed in object position, this should work for canonical n-triples.
You can get TSV by replacing said space characters with tab. If you also do that for the last space character and do not remove the dot, you have a file that is both a valid n-triples and a TSV file. If you take these positions as split positions, you can work with canonical n-triples files without conversion to CSV/TSV.
Note that you may have to deal with commas/tabs in the RDF terms (eg. by escaping), but that problem exists in any solution for RDF as CSV/TSV.
Scenario: I'm working on a rails app that will take data entry in the form of uploaded text-based files. I need to parse these files before importing the data. I can choose the file type uploaded to the app; the software (Microsoft Access) used by those uploading has several export options regarding file type.
While it may be insignificant, I was wondering if there is a specific file type that is most efficiently parsed. This question can be viewed as language-independent, I believe.
(While XML is commonly parsed, it is not a feasible file type for sake of this project.)
If it is something exported by Access, the easiest would be CSV; particularly since Ruby contains a CSV parser in the standard library. You will have to do some work determining the dialect of CSV (what it uses for delimiter, how it handles quotes); I don't know how robust the ruby parser is with those issues, but you also should have some control from Microsoft Access.
You might want to take a look at JSON. It's a lightweight format, and in contrast to XML it's really easy and clean to parse without requiring a huge library on the backend.
It can represent types like strings, numbers, assosiative arrays (objects), and lists of such
I would suggest n-SV (where n is some character) for data that does not include n. That will make lexing the files a matter of a split.
If you have more flexible data, I would suggest JSON.
If you've HAVE to roll your own parser, I would suggest CSV or some form of a delimiter separated format.
If you are able to use other libraries, there are plenty of options. JSON looks quite fascinating.
I have a binary file. I don't know how it's formatted, I only know it comes from a delphi code.
Does it exist any way to analyze a binary file?
Does it exist any "pattern" to analyze and deserialize the binary content of a file with unknown format?
Try these:
Deserialize data: analyze how it's compiled your exe (try File Analyzer). Try to deserialize the binary data with the language discovered. Then serialize it in a xml format (language-indipendent) that every programming language can understand
Analyze the binary data: try to save various versions of the file with little variation and use a diff program to analyze the meaning of every bit with an hex editor. Use it in conjunction with binary hacking techniques (like How to crack a Binary File Format by Frans Faase)
Reverse Engineer the application: try getting code using reverse engineering tools for the programming language used for build the app (found with File Analyzer). Otherwise use disassembler analysis tool like IDA Pro Disassembler
For my hobby project I had to reverse engineer some old game files. My approaches were:
Have a good hex editor.
Look for readable words in the binary file. Note how their distribution is. If the distance between them is constant you know it is a listing.
Look for 2-3 consequent zeros. Might indicate an int32 value.
Some dwords might be pointers into the file.
Try to identify reoccurring patterns in the file.
Seeing lots of C0-CF might indicate RLE compressed data.
I've developed Hexinator (Window & Linux) and Synalyze It! (macOS) exactly for this purpose. These applications allow you to see the binary files like in other hex editors but additionally you can create a "grammar" with the specifics of a binary file format. The grammar contains all the building blocks and is used to parse the file automatically.
Thus you can keep the knowledge you gain in the analysis and apply it to multiple files simultaneously. You can also color-code the bits and pieces of file formats for a quick overview in the hex editor.
The parsing results are displayed in a tree view where you can also modify the files easily (applying endianness et cetera).
Reverse engineering a binary file when you have some idea of what it represents is a very time consuming process. If you have no idea what it is then it will be even harder.
It is possible though, but you have to have a pretty good reason for doing so.
The first step would be to open it up in a hex editor of your choice and see if you can find any English text to point you in the direction of what the file is even supposed to represent. From there, Google "Reverse Engineering binary files", there are much more knowledgeable people than me that have written guides about it.
The "strings" program from GNU binutils is very useful. It will print the strings of printable characters in a file, quite often giving a clue to what a file contains or a program does.
If the data represents serialized Delphi objects, you should start reading about the Delphi serialization process. If that's the case, I think your best bet would be to load it using Delphi and continue your analysis from the IDE. Some informations about Delphi serialization can be found here.
EDIT: if the file does contain serialized delphi objects, then you should write a small delphi program that loads it, and "convert" the data yourself to something neutral, like xml. If you manage to do this, you should check and see if delphi supports serializing to xml. Then, you could access those objects from any language.
The unix "file" command is really useful - I don't know if there is anything like it in windows. You run it like this:
file myfile.ext
And it spits out a text description based on the magic numbers and data contained therein.
Probably it is contained within cygwin.
If you have access to the application that creates the file, you can apply changes to the application, then save the file and see the effects (Keep in mind that numbers are probably stored in little endian):
First create the file repeatedly. If the files are not binary equal, the current date/time is probably stored in the area where hte differences occur.
Maybe you want to repeat that with the software running under different environments, to see if OS version etc are stored, but this is rather unusual.
Next you can try to change single variables and create several files that only differ in the value of this variable. This helps you identify where this variable is stored.
That way you can also exclude variables that are not stored in the file: If you change them, but the files created are identical, they are not stored.
In order to test the hypotheses you worked out with the steps above, edit one of the files and have the application read it.
If you don't have access to the application itself, I suggest that you forget about it and find another way to solve your problem. There is a very high probability that it will be faster...
If file does not give a meaningful answer, you may want to try TRiD by Marco Pontello to determine whether your data is stored in a known format.
Get the Delphi application and open it in IDA Pro freeware version, and find where it writes the file, and decode how it writes the file that way.
Unless it's plan text.
Do you know the program that uses it? If so you can hook that programs write to file function and get an idea of what data its writing, the size of the data and where.
More Info: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/DLL/Win32APIHooking_Trouble.aspx
Unlike traditional hex editors which only display the raw hex bytes of a file, 010 Editor can also parse a file into a hierarchical structure using a Binary Template. The results of running a Binary Template are much easier to understand and edit than using just the raw hex bytes.
http://www.sweetscape.com/010editor/
Try to open it in a hex editor and analyse.