September 2013

There were 2 posts published in September 2013.

Simple LaTeX Table Generator

Anyone who's ever had to type up a large table in LaTeX knows that it can be a bit of work. When faced with a particulalry large table myself, I of course thought "why not python?".

It turns out there are already a few ways to generate latex tables, but here's my take:

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""" This short script converts a CSV table into latex table.
 
Command Line Arguments:
 
required positional arguments:
infile input file name
 
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-ncols N, --numbercolumns N
number of columns in file
-vd, --verticaldivider
adds vertical dividers to table
-hd, --horizontaldivider
adds horizontal dividers to table
"""
 
import csv
import sys
import argparse
 
# define and parse input arguments
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("infile", help="input file name")
parser.add_argument("-ncols", "--numbercolumns", type=int, help="number of columns in file", default=2)
parser.add_argument("-vd", "--verticaldivider", action="store_true", help="adds vertical dividers to table")
parser.add_argument("-hd", "--horizontaldivider", action="store_true", help="adds horizontal dividers to table")
args = parser.parse_args()
 
# csv input and latex table output files
infile = args.infile
outfile = infile +".table"
 
with open(infile, 'r') as inf:
    with open(outfile, 'w') as out:
        reader = csv.reader(inf)
 
        # build the table beginning code based on number of columns and args
        # columns all left justified
        code_header = "\\begin{tabular}{"
        for i in range(args.numbercolumns):
            code_header += " l "
            if i < args.numbercolumns - 1 and args.verticaldivider:
                code_header += "|"
        code_header += "}\n\\hline\n"
        out.write(code_header)
 
        # begin writing data
        for row in reader:
            # replace "," with "&"
            if args.horizontaldivider:
                out.write(" & ".join(row) + " \\\\ \\hline\n")
            else:
                out.write(" & ".join(row) + " \\\\ \n")
 
        if not args.horizontaldivider:
            out.write("\\hline\n")
 
        out.write("\\end{tabular}")

Example input file:

1,2,3
4,5,6

Running with the -vd and -hd flags to specify vertical and horizontal dividers produces:

\begin{tabular}{ l | l | l }
\hline
1 & 2 & 3 \\ \hline
4 & 5 & 6 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}

It's very minimal, and the main idea is that it does 95% of the work for you, leaving only very minor cosmetic tweaks.

Minecraft Minigame Match Dynamics

As a physics student, it can be difficult to not think of things as point particles - even players engaging in minecraft minigame matches on the Overcast Network.

So as a Saturday afternoon project, I made a simple client mod that allows you to write all of the player positions on the current world to a CSV file. Then, using  Mathematica, I processed the data and made some simple visualizations:

This shows the player positions, colored by team.  This match takes place on a map called Warlock (one of my favorites), and the goal is to be the first team to break the other team's monument (which is made out of two pieces of obsidian).  Red team won this match, and you can see a red guy sneaking near the blue's monument (probably underground) in the bottom left for a few minutes before finally breaking it.

See more visualizations here (I don't want to lag up the page with gifs), and view the source code here.