Re: [Gnuplot-py-users] Obtaining Gnuplot output as string

On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Michael Haggerty wrote:

> What about having gnuplot write the output to a temporary file and
> then read the file?
Besides the possible speed constraint I'm afraid that this does not
work very well in Zope.  I'm a Zope beginner but I'm afraid that its
Philosophy does not like disk access very much.

> If you are under Unix, you could even have
For sure. It's Debian GNU/Linux.

> gnuplot write the output to a fifo (named pipe) and read it directly
> into your program.
This seems to be the best solution.  But how to do that.  Any example
to let GnuPlot write to a named pipe and read this in a Python program?
Sorry, I'm no experienced Python programmer.

> I don't think there is a way to get at the string any other way.  One
> could change Gnuplot.py to read gnuplot's standard output, but I'm not
> sure that output would only have the pure graphics.  If you want to
> pursue this, you would probably want to do it by providing your own
> substitute GnuplotProcess object.
Well at least I tried `my_program.py > image.eps` and got perfectly the
same as when I set the output to image.eps.  This is no proof but might
be an option for further versions to include (at least for testing ...).

Kind regards

         Andreas.