The SPCX Butcher

This project is an SPCX parsing library.

Why call it SpcxButcher?

Well, we love photons. SPCX files? not so much.

After some experience with the SPCX format we decided that parsing them would be too lenient.

WE DECIDED TO BUTCHER THEM INSTEAD!!

Python 3

SPCX Butcher uses Python 3. We did not test it using Python 2

Installation

$ pip install spcxbutcher

A small, fake SPCX file to play with

Download small.spcx here.

Coverting SPCX files to MATLAB format

You will also need SciPy for this. The following will take an SPCX file and produce many *.mat files, one per SPC. E.g.:

$ spcx_to_matlab data/example.spcx data/some_prefix

will produce some_prefix.0.mat, some_prefix.1.mat, some_prefix.2.mat,... in the data directory.

Coverting SPCX files to JSON format

The following will take an SPCX file and write a JSON representation of it to stdout.

$ spcx_to_json small.spcx
{"spcs": [{"events": [[0, 3, 47638]], "raw": 0, "timePerBin": 164610}, {"events": [[0, 6, 42779], [0, 6, 47325]], "raw": 0, "timePerBin": 164610}, {"events": [[0, 2, 47560], [0, 9, 47947], [0, 5, 48175]], "raw": 0, "timePerBin": 164610}]}

Converting an SPCX file to text

Try this:

$ spcx_view small.spcx
=== SPC ===
raw: 0
timePerBin: 164610
lvttl   timestamp       gap
3       47638   0
=== SPC ===
raw: 0
timePerBin: 164610
lvttl   timestamp       gap
6       42779   0
6       47325   0
=== SPC ===
raw: 0
timePerBin: 164610
lvttl   timestamp       gap
2       47560   0
9       47947   0
5       48175   0

Using SPCX Butcher from your Python program

import spcxbutcher.spcxparser

parsed = spcxbutcher.spcxparser.SPCXParser( 'some_file.spcx' )
for spc in parsed:
    for event in spc:
        print( event.timestamp, event.channel )

Running Unit Tests

Clone this repository. From the top directory run:

$ ./run_tests.sh