Question

With GNU Plot, I normally process x, y, z data in three separate columns:

x1, y1, z1
x2, y1, z2
...
...
xn, yn, zn

and I used splot 'filename.ext' with lines to quickly get the a 3D plot

Due to our new system requirements, we have to store data in the following form:

x1
y1
z1
x2
y2
z2
.
.
xn
yn
zn

I already written a simple code in C# to transform our results into 3 columns for easy viewing in GNU Plot.

My question is, if the data is now only a one dimensional array, is there a way to plot this in GNU Plot directly without having my program to re-saved our results as a 3 columns results?

Thank you.

Regards,
ikel

Additional info: I am running on Win7, 64 bit, and using the Win binaries of GNU Plot. Apparently, I don’t have paste, sed and popen (see discussion below).

Answer 1

I don’t know how to make Gnuplot interpret the input as groups of three, but if your version of Gnuplot supports popen, you can join the lines on the fly with e.g. paste or sed:

splot '< paste - - - < filename.ext' with lines

Or:

splot '< sed "N; N; s/\n/ /g" filename.ext' with lines