From: "baptiste Auguié" <ba208@...>
Date: 2007-06-30T19:37:46+09:00
Subject: storing and manipulating columns of data

Hi,

Being used to deal with Octave / Matlab, I'm a bit confused by Ruby  
structures (arrays, hashes, etc). I have this data file "data.dat"  
with 3 columns:


> 1.240000	9.990000e-01	1.290000e-06
> 1.550000	1.000000e+00	2.920000e-06
> 2.066000	1.002000e+00	8.360000e-06
> 2.480000	1.001000e+00	1.520000e-05
> 2.755000	1.001000e+00	2.210000e-05
> 3.099000	1.003000e+00	3.570000e-05
> 3.444000	1.003000e+00	3.240000e-05
> 3.542000	1.003000e+00	1.720000e-05
> 4.133000	1.001000e+00	1.430000e-05
> 4.959000	1.001000e+00	2.400000e-05
> 6.199000	1.001000e+00	4.720000e-05
> 8.265000	9.990000e-01	1.210000e-04

I would like to think of the columns as arrays "a", "b", "c", execute  
a loop along their indices, pick the values i want, and do something  
with them. What would be a sensible data structure for this?
I can read this datafile line by line using IO:readlines("data.dat"),  
but I cannot find a way to refer to one column in the array of  
strings generated.


Best regards,

baptiste