[Tex/LaTex] File input and output

content-replicationfilesystem-access

Are there any LaTeX packages that can assist with reading and writing to files? I am trying to develop a solution to the following problem:

1) I am producing a long report regularly. Part of the report include items like

   Key date: 12 Sep 2010    Complete Floor 1
   Key date: 18 Sep 2010    Other activity

2) It will be nice to have all these dates saved into a sort of an aux file and then import later as a section of its own. It will also need to be sorted.

I have so far looked at the answers package for inspiration and also thought of hacking the
index mechanism. Any ideas and pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

Sounds like the perfect task for the datatool package. It is design to create "databases" in TeX, which can then be saved to an external file and then read in later. Lots of useful data manipulation commands, as well.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Read arbitrary lines from file

No, you can't read arbitrary lines, but you can't do that in most other programming languages either. You have to read line after line from the beginning. Apart from the \read primitive, there is also the \readline primitive which reads a line verbatim. You can use that to save all lines in macros and use these afterward:

\newread\myread
\newcount\linecnt
\openin\myread=file.dat
\@whilesw\unless\ifeof\myread\fi{%
  \advance\linecnt by \@ne
  \readline\myread t\expandafter o\csname line-\number\linecnt\endcsname
}

[Tex/LaTex] Including a relative path to a class file

You can use the TEXINPUTS environment variable to locally change the search paths.

Unix

Run

export TEXINPUTS="..:"

before your LaTeX commands. Or set the variable only for one command:

TEXINPUTS="..:" pdflatex …

Windows

Run

set TEXINPUTS="..;"

to set the environment variable in a current command line shell or batch file session.