[Insight-developers] Spaces in filenames for metaImage regular expression

[Mark Tsuchida]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Padfield, Dirk R (GE Global Research)
<padfield at research.ge.com> wrote:
> Before the “MET_StringToWordArray”
> parsed words based only on spaces, but now if it sees a double quote it
> ignores spaces until it sees the next double quote.  Surrounding the
> filename with quotes is consistent with how executables handle file names
> with spaces.

I would point out that this would cause problems if anybody ever needed to
handle filenames containing quote characters (which is perfectly legal on
most systems).

I am just an occasional user of MetaIO and I don't know if the core
developers feel that such a level of generality is necessary, but (short of
implementing a complicated lexer for a C-like or shell-like quoted string
syntax) one simple and general solution would be to use backslash as an
escape character ("\ " = non-delimiting space, "\\" = single backslash,
"\x" = "x" for any character x, all without the double quotes). This would
also be consistent with one way in which file names with spaces and other
special characters are handled on the (Unix) command line. The problem does
remain of what to do if a backslash is encountered at the end of the
(already split out) line.

But then again, it might be considered weird that "\%" would behave just
like "%"; there would still be no generally applicable way to handle
filenames containing a "%" (a quick look at the code (metaImage.cxx)
suggests that "50%dose.dat" would behave unexpectedly, as would
"50%%dose.dat" and "50%%section.dat", while "50%section.dat" would result
in a segfault). There may or may not be a (sufficiently)
backward-compatible way to fix all of these issues.

Mark



On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Bill Lorensen <bill.lorensen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dirk,
>
> If you do submit a patch, beware that you will not be able to merge it
> since it is in the ThirdParty metaio tree. This is not a problem for
> reviewers, just that someone from Kitware who has the permission to do
> so will have to merge it. This is because meta io is used in several
> packages other than ITK.
>
> Looks like a good idea. You should probbaly add Stephen Aylward as a
> reviewer.
>
> Bill
>
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Padfield, Dirk R (GE Global Research)
> <padfield at research.ge.com> wrote:
> > Hi ITK Developers,
> >
> >
> >
> > I want to gather your thoughts before submitting a patch.  I frequently
> read
> > lists of 2D images into ITK as a volume, and I use metaImage .mhd files
> to
> > specify the header information.  Unfortunately, my code needs to handle
> > images that have spaces in the names, and this doesn’t currently work
> with
> > the regular expression functionality in metaImage.  I end up having to
> use
> > “LIST” instead, but this becomes cumbersome.  So I modified the code of
> > Modules\ThirdParty\MetaIO\src\MetaIO\metaUtils.cxx slightly to handle
> file
> > names surrounded by double quotes.  Before the “MET_StringToWordArray”
> > parsed words based only on spaces, but now if it sees a double quote it
> > ignores spaces until it sees the next double quote.  Surrounding the
> > filename with quotes is consistent with how executables handle file names
> > with spaces.
> >
> >
> >
> > For example, to read the first 90 slices of a series, I can now do this:
> >
> > ElementDataFile = "B - 2(fld 1 z %02d).tif" 1 90 1
> >
> >
> >
> > My question is: does anyone see any problem with making such a change?  I
> > just wanted to gather some feedback before submitting the patch.
> >
> >
> >
> > Also, if anyone wants me to add them as a reviewer to the patch, please
> let
> > me know.
> >
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Dirk
> >
> >
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