The READ_WAVE procedure reads a .wave or .bwave file created by the Wavefront Advanced Data Visualizer into a series of IDL variables.
| Note |
This routine is written in the IDL language. Its source code can be found in the file read_wave.pro in the lib subdirectory of the IDL distribution.
READ_WAVE, File, Variables, Names, Dimensions [, MESHNAMES=variable]
A scalar string containing the name of the Wavefront file to read.
A named variable that will contain a block of the variables contained in the wavefront file. Since each variable in a wavefront file can have more than one field (for instance, a vector variable has 3 fields), the fields of each variable make up the major index into the variable block. For instance, if a Wavefront file had one scalar variable and one vector variable, the scalar would be extracted as follows:
scalar_variable = variables[0,*,*,*]
and the vector variable would be extracted as follows:
vector_variable = variables[1:3,*,*,*]
To find the dimensions of the returned variable, see the description of the Dimensions argument.
A named variable that will contain the string names of each variable contained in the file.
A named variable that will contain a long array describing how many fields in the large returned variable block each variable occupies. In the above example of one scalar variable followed by a vector variable, the dimension variable would be [1,3].
This indicates that the first field of the returned variable block would be the scalar variable and the following 3 fields would comprise the vector variable.
Set this keyword to a named variable that will contain the name of the mesh used in the Wavefront file for each variable.
Introduced: Pre 4.0