Specparser is a Python module providing, as the name implies, a parser for the data files produced by the instrument control software spec by Certified Scientific Software. It is pure Python and does not have dependencies outside of the Python standard library.
The parser is initialized by giving a file object containing the spec data file as an argument.
>>> import specparser >>> fid = open('testdata/oneline.spec') >>> p = specparser.Specparser(fid)
A Python representation of the full spec data file can be obtained with the parse method.
>>> scans = p.parse()
The result is a multi-valued dictionary, with scan numbers as keys. Usually there is only one scan in the SPEC file with a single scan number. In this case, the scans can be accessed with the syntax scan[number].
>>> scans[1].keys() ['ncols', 'motors', 'number', 'comments', 'time_units', 'date', 'command', 'time', 'npoints', 'unknown_headers', 'counters', 'counting-to', 'fourc', 'columns', 'hklstart'] >>> scans[1]['counters'].keys() ['Monitor', 'Seconds', 'H', 'K', 'Two Theta', 'Epoch', 'Detector 2', 'Detector 3', 'Detector'] >>> scans[1]['counters']['Detector'] [1.0]
The scans can also be accessed with the syntax scans[number, index], in case there are more than one scan with the same number. Here number is the scan number and index is the repeat of the scan in the SPEC file, i.e. scan[123, 0] is the first scan in the file with number 123, scan[123, 1] is the second etc.
>>> scans[1,0]['counters']['Detector'] [1.0]
Methods header(), next_scan(), next_scan_header(), and next_point() can be used to read a spec-file incrementally. A typical use case would be reading the scans or scan points immediately when they are created.
See the code and docstrings for details.
C library called specfile has been written at the ESRF. Somewhat maintained copy with Python bindings is included with the sources of PyMca, see for example here.
You can redistribute and/or modify Specparser under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl2.html for the license text.
Specparser was written by Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen@gmail.com>.
Copyright © 2010-2011 Paul Scherrer Institute (http://www.psi.ch/)