Question

I’m trying to get the floats from a string.
I mean reading line by line from a text file and getting the floats from a line. I found how to read line by line but I couldn’t split the string into floats.
Here is an example input file:

10,10,18,18.1

7,3 ,10,14.2

3,3,5.3,5

I’ve looked at sscanf but I couldn’t do it. Any idea?

Answer 1

From years of experience, I’ve found that scanf is unlikely to do exactly what you want. It’s OK for a quick test program.

One possibility is to use Str.split:

let floats_of_string s =
    List.map float_of_string (Str.split (Str.regexp "[, \t]+") s)

You might need to make the regexp a little tighter if you want to detect invalid input.