CSc 4630/6630 Programming Assignment #2

Documentation
The first thing in your program should be documentation, such as the following. This should appear at the very top of your program.
  % program(number).m
  %
  % Author: (Your Name)
  % Account: (your account name, or student e-mail)
  % CSc 4630/6630 Program (this program number)
  %
  % Due date: (put the due date here)
  %
  % Description:
  % (Give a brief description of what your program does.)
  %
  % Input:
  % (State what the program inputs are.)
  %
  % Output:
  % (State what the program outputs are.)
  %
  % Usage:
  % (Give an example of how to use your program.)
  % (For example: out = myabs(in); )
  %
Verify that the help command shows this information.

Objectives

1. Practice designing a program iteratively.
2. Practice implementing a program design in MATLAB.
3. Practice testing a program.
4. To read/write data files.

Temperature Test
A common problem is to bridge the gap between one program and another. That is, we might have one program that generates output, and desire to use that output as the input to another program. However, the two programs are written with different goals in mind, so the output of the first might be incompatible with the input of the second. This assignment is an example of that kind of problem.

The attached file is called "temp_test.txt", which is plain text. It is the output of a program that controls a burner and a pump, and measures temperatures in two containers. This specific output is the result of a test, where both temperature probes were exposed to the same conditions. They should report the same measurements, and a variation might mean that one of them should be replaced.

The pattern is:
time-stamp elapsed-time step-number container1-name measurement1 "F, Target: " set-temperature1 "F," pump-status-text "status" pump-status-number container2-name measurement2 "F, Target: " set-temperature2 "F," burner-status-text "status" burner-status-number "mix" mixing-status

For example:
1:0:51 0:0:51 2 indirect 162.2 F, Target: 154.0 F, Pump off, status 0 direct 165.0 F, Target: 164.0 F, Heat off, status 0 mix 0

However, there are comments in the file that should be ignored. Also, it is possible that the text "C," might appear before "Target:", if the temperatures are measured in Centigrade.

To see how well the temperature probes match, we need to plot the data. The goal of this assignment is to generate a file containing only the two temperature readings (measurement1 and measurement2) from each line. Given the example line above, your program should write:
        162.2, 165.0
to a file as one line. Of course, it should write all other temperature readings to the file, too.

To do this, it will need to parse the information from the file. We need to make a few assumptions and observations to do this.

• First, we can treat each line individually. A good first step is to open the file, use the "fgetl" command to get a line, and display it. Then get the next line and display it, and repeat until the entire file has been read (and displayed). Once you have this, you can focus on parsing the line.
• The program will need to figure out if a line contains a comment or data. One assumption that makes this simpler is that the first few characters will contain a colon (:) when it is a data line. Your program can check the characters from 1 until the first space, and if any of these is a colon, it can safely conclude that it is a data line. Verify that it can differentiate the data lines from the others. One way to do this is to have it print "data " or "comment " as it displays each line. Then, you can look through the displayed text to make sure it is correct.
• Another assumption is that each item on a line is separated by spaces. However, there may be multiple spaces. Think about how you would parse the line; you would ignore any additional spaces between items after the first one, and would treat "item1(space)item2" the same as "item1(space)(space)item2". This is more difficult than it looks. A way to handle this is to think of the string as a collection of spaces and non-spaces. You could, for example, copy the string to another one character at a time, but not copy a space if the last character copied is a space. You might want to test this part separately, until you get it right. You can also have it work on a simpler test string, i.e. "red 123 blue" (with 2 spaces after "red" and three spaces after 123) should be output as "red 123 blue" (with one space between each).
• Once you have a way to get each item from the line separately, you can count the items, and output only the two relevant ones. Make sure to put a comma after the first one. When you have that working, open a file called "temp_test.csv" and write each pair of values. In your program, you can comment out the lines that display the file contents to the screen.

To solve your problem, write a program that reads the necessary information to compute and output the indicated values, as efficiently as possible. Design your program by specifying its behavior, identifying the variables and operations it needs to solve the problem, and then organizing the variables and operations into an algorithm. For our purposes, include functions as operations. Then code your design in MATLAB using step-wise translation. Finally, test your program thoroughly.

Turn In Your Work

1. your source code 
2. the output where you test the correctness of your program (using a script*). Use more if the testing needs it. 

Make sure to use plain text files (.txt, .csv, or .m, as appropriate).


* A script is short for typescript, where everything typed is saved. This keeps a log of all the input and output. MATLAB provides this capability with the diary command. For example, diary out records all inputs and outputs in a file named ``out''. Do NOT call your script file ``programX.m'', or it may overwrite your homework! Make sure to keep a backup of your work. Type help diary at the MATLAB prompt for more information.