## Reading a txt file and building a matrix

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sofiag96
Posts: 2
Joined: 05 Jul 2022, 19:26

### Reading a txt file and building a matrix

Hi all,

I am still very new to Polymake (but have managed to do my first computations!) and I have a question regarding reading a .txt file. I have a txt file where each of its rows describes the vertices of a polytope, i.e., the file looks like this:

[[0,0],[1,0],[1,2]]
[[0,0],[1,0],[0,1],[1,1]]
...

I want to read the file line by line and create a polytope with the entry from each line. My reasoning is that I could create a matrix from each line, then insert a column of ones and build the polytope I want. So far, I have managed to read the file and compiled all lines of the file into an array @lines

If I now print the following

print "\$lines =$lines\n";

I obtain the correct result for each line where i is between 0 and the number of lines of the txt file. However, if I try to create a matrix using for example

my $m=new Matrix<Rational>(<$lines[0]>);
print $m; this does not generate an ERROR but it does not print my matrix m. I am not sure what the error here is, but I believe it has something to do with the data type obtained from the txt file. For example, if I write my$m=new Matrix<Rational>([[0,0],[1,0],[1,2]]);
print $m; this describes precisely the object I want to obtain from the code above. Could you help me realize my mistake? Or is there an easier way of constructing a polytope from such a txt file? Thank you! gawrilow Main Author Posts: 405 Joined: 25 Dec 2010, 17:40 ### Re: Reading a txt file and building a matrix Operator <> in perl means reading text from a file handle. However, I suspect, your array @lines already contains the rows with numbers loaded from your file, you should simply pass it by reference: new Matrix<Rational>(\@lines) If$lines[$i] still contains a line of text just looking like perl data, you should "translate" it into real perl objects: new Matrix<Rational>(eval$lines[\$i])

sofiag96
Posts: 2
Joined: 05 Jul 2022, 19:26

### Re: Reading a txt file and building a matrix

This works perfectly! Thanks!

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