绘制和显示数组的简单方法？

Question

First post here. Using C in Visual Studio 2008. Can work with VS 2005 if necessary.

1. How do I display numerical data in arrays as in a spreadsheet?
2. How do I plot numerical data in arrays?

These seem to be simple questions. But I cannot find solutions. So far, I would print the data to a file, import into Excel and view/plot. However, with this code there are too many arrays--so the print/import/plot is tiring. Some constraints.

1. I do not want to write 20+ lines of code to do the above. MATFOR or Array Visualizer let you do the plotting with a one line function call.
2. They cannot display the data in a convenient format. I would like to display the data and the plot in one or two windows so that they are visible simultaneously.
3. This is a win32 console application---all the code is portable.
4. Will be using these during debugging.
5. Free or paid.

While I am looking for something specific, the requirements are substantially the same for any one doing numerical work with arrays and matrices--displaying data and plot simultaneously. I am hoping that a such a tool has been written and is available. I am also open to a solution that outputs the array data to an Excel sheet (can keep Excel open) and if it can also plot that can be great but I can live without plotting.

PS: I need this only when debugging the code.

Answer 1

I use ArrayDebugView which is a plug-in you install in Visual studio and draws graphs out of arrays while you are debugging your application. It works as a visual way of variable watch in debug mode. You don't need to write a line of code.

Answer 2

I made a simple plotting program for that purpose. There is only a textbox where I paste the data and a chart where it's drawn.

The data needs to be in either form:

• with an automatic X (increment by 1 for each value): seriesName value
• for both X and Y specified: seriesName xvalue yvalue

Most of the time I used to plot data from tracepoints. I copy/paste the whole output window of VS, the plotting program ignores anything that doesn't follow these 2 forms (so I don't have to cleanup the string and put it in excel and all).

It does line, point, colum, area charts and save image, copy to clipboard.

MiniPlot

Answer 3

There are several ways to do this but this will require writing some code. Visualizing data is generally easy and straight forward but visualizing data exactly the way you want them to look will require some additional code and work.

There are several options to visualize data:

A combination of BASH and GNUPLOT

Use MATLAB or OCTAVE for all your calculations and visualization

Use PYTHON and SciPy and matlibplot libraries.

Gnuplot is a great tool to plot data but it is cumbersome to use. It looks fabulous if you invest time to get the plots right and combines excellent with LaTeX and has a good fit implementation for arbitrary functions. Visit http://gnuplot-tricks.blogspot.ch/ great site to learn all about gnuplot.

Numerical programs such as MATLAB and it's open source equivalent OCTAVE are great because they are fast implementation languages for numerical programs and have extensive additional libraries especially MATLAB. For high load numerical computing it is really slow and the plot library is only good for basic plotting needs.

Using PYTHON and its scientific programing libraries (SciPy and matlibplot) are a great combination. This allows excellent plot which are not as cryptic as gnuplot to plrogram and it is more flexible than MATLAB in plotting. Additionally it gives you a environment for numerical programing like MATLAB.

Answer 4

I can't think of any library that would enable what you want in a console app in less than 20 lines of code. My suggestion would be instead to script the plotting-step using MATLAB og GNU Octave to do the actual plotting.

Answer 5

In order to display numerical data in array, you should add the pointer to the first data element you want to observe, into the watch --- if you want to observe the array from the beginning, it would just be the array name, which is the pointer to the first element. In order to view more then one element, you add a "," after the pointer, followed by the number of element you want to observe. For example, in order to observe the elements of float farray[100]; , you should add to the watch farray,100 .

In order to plot, you can copy-paste from the watch to your plotting software (ie excel), but it is not very convenient as you cannot copy the data column alone, but the columns to the left and right as well, so it involves extra manual editing.

Answer 6

I use GNUPlot (http://www.gnuplot.info/) to display my performance/speedup measurements. I print my numbers to stdout and wrote a bash script that combines these numbers and calls gnuplot for rendering.