[mesa-users] Profile name zero padding

[Ehsan Moravveji]

Dear Bill and Josiah,
Thanks for your replies. I totally understand the developer’s design, and why the profile.index keeps the task of bookkeeping the file write outs.
I’ve already been living happily with star_write_profile_info(), so I will keep my engagement on going ;-)

Best regards,
Ehsan



On Dec 5, 2014, at 6:08 PM, Josiah Schwab <jwschwab at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Hi Ehsan,
> 
>> I would like to ask for a new feature regarding the profile names. 
>> I find it a bit inconvenient that profile names are not zero padded
>> from left, because when listing the stored profiles in the LOGS
>> directory with “ls” command, or when using “glob” in python to fetch
>> the list of available files, they are no longer returned in the order
>> by which they were produced. E.g. profile11.data will appear after
>> profile1.data, but before profile2.data. Left zero padding resolves
>> this. This makes life easier (and happier :-D) when plotting profiles
>> in sequential order.
> 
> As Bill said, the number in the profile isn't a meaningful ordering, so
> from a design standpoint, it makes sense to leave things as is.
> 
> But when I'm doing something quick and dirty, I do cheat sometimes and
> use the profile number as a proxy for model order.  But it's easy enough
> to sort things in non-lexicographic order that you may not even need to
> bother with zero-padding.  Since software versions are numbered without
> leading zeros, most tools have options for this kind of sort.
> 
> When using ls, check out the `-v' option:
> 
>    -v     natural sort of (version) numbers within text
> 
> which gives you what you want.  If you have an old version of ls that
> doesn't support that, you could reverse sort by timestamp `-tr'
> 
> In the case of python glob, the order is arbitrary, so you have to sort
> it anyways.  You can use "version" sorting here too, or do something
> simple on your own.
> 
>    import distutils
>    files = glob.glob('profile*.data')
>    sorted(files, key=distutils.version.LooseVersion)
> 
> But of course, the best advice is still to always get the order from
> profiles.index.
> 
> Hope that helps,
> Josiah
> 
> 
> 
>