One of the most popular posts on this blog is Kelle’s reposting of Greenfield and Jedrzejewski’s IDL vs Python earlier this year. I am an avid Python user and have never installed IDL on my computer. Recently, I developed IDLSave, a package to read IDL ‘save’ files into Python, after being sent a few such files by collaborators. In this package, scalars are converted to their respective Python types, while arrays and structures are mapped to Numpy arrays and recarrays respectively. Most importantly, IDLSave does not require an installation of IDL.
With this package, there will be no need to bug your collaborators who send you IDL save files to resend them in a different format. This also means that if you are an IDL user holding back from switching over to Python because you have a large number of legacy IDL save files, you can now read these files directly into Python without first re-converting them to another format.
Using IDLSave is easy. Let’s say you (or a collaborator) writes a save file with
IDL> save, wavelength, flux, file='spectrum.sav'
you will now be able to open this file in Python using
>>> import idlsave
>>> s = idlsave.read('spectrum.sav')
after which you will be able to access the values using s.wavelength and s.flux.
The IDLSave homepage includes download and installation instructions. If you encounter problems reading in save files, don’t give up – please submit a bug report through the bug tracker, and I will look into it! One of the main limitations worth noting is that while it is possible to read save files into Python, it isn’t (currently) possible to write save files for reading back into IDL. It also is not possible to read special variables such as pointers or system variables from save files.
Enjoy!
