Parsing an .rw5 file into to Excel

The BS and SS records are the most important. Add the LS records if you're going to track elevations. If you're willing to isolate those records manually (by stripping out all others and saving as a new file) you'll simplify the process. Still, it's not a trivial undertaking.

Good luck!

Could be done with Excel VB script I'm sure, however I would suggest that Python Script with Notepad++ would be the way to go for this type of application. http://npppythonscript.sourceforge.net/&apos ;">Python Script - Plugin for Notepad++

I haven't found a easier way to write custom file parsing code than Python Script. Very powerful too!

I have some sample python code that you could use as a starting point if you are interested.

rfc, post: 337957, member: 8882 wrote: I've got a full summer's worth of traverses around a 25 acre parcel, which I've used to learn field work. From these I've created .rw5 files from the data collector (using SurvCE). Many of these have blunders of all sorts; some have been manually fixed; others not yet found. I've learned a lot along the way, surveying, plotting, translating, rotating, re-surveying, stitching the files together etc.

But it's Friday, the day I usually ponder the bigger picture; I'm looking towards winter, during which I'll have a lot of time to do further homework on these traverses, and it has led to this question:

If I were to write a macro(s) in Excel that could parse and extract nothing but the observations in the .rw5...like this:

BD,OP302,FP301,AR0.0000,ZE99.2410,SD473.193000,--hill
FD,OP302,FP303,AR130.1601,ZE83.5912,SD452.258000,--NEAR XFMR
FR,OP302,FP303,AR310.1607,ZE276.0100,SD452.253000,--NEAR XFMR
BR,OP302,FP301,AR180.0054,ZE260.3547,SD473.192000,--hill
--SS,OP302,FP301,AR0.0000,ZE99.2412,SD473.192500,--hill
--SS,OP302,FP303,AR130.1537,ZE83.5906,SD452.255500,--NEAR XFMR

into something that looks like a Starnet file:
[pre]From At To AR SD
301 302 303 130-15-37 452.2555
[/pre]

I could "wash and rinse" dozens of these files, gleaning from them hundreds of redundant observations between (for the most part), all of my two dozen or so, "control" points.

Note that in the example above, the DC is using SS records to mean the foresights and backsights. I'd be happy with using just those records if it made it simpler to do in Excel.

The purpose of this (aside from just seeing if it's possible, of course), would be to help find blunders; possibly include all the observations into a "manual" least squares attempt, or at least look at the magnitude of the average of the errors I find (possibly correlating them with time) etc.

Before anyone advises me to just buy Starnet and one of the available converters, be advised it's just not in the budget yet; Even if it were, I'm not sure it'd be cable of ingesting multiple .rw5's into the same analysis (but don't want this to be a discussion on Starnet capabilities).

So the question for this Friday is: Does anyone have some ideas on how complex this might be to do in Excel? I'm not a total whiz but do know my way around the program a fair bit. Some manual manipulation or pre-processing of the .rw5's would be OK. I got all winter to do this, lol.

You might check out this SurvCE RW5 report generator as hosted by Carlson's EMEA web-server... it has an output to CSV format:

[INDENT=1]Carlson Software Report Generator[/INDENT]

Ladd Nelson, post: 338098, member: 307 wrote: You might check out this SurvCE RW5 report generator as hosted by Carlson's EMEA web-server... it has an output to CSV format:

[INDENT]http://www.carlsonemea.com/cwa/report/index.php?lang=ENG&apos ;">Carlson Software Report Generator[/INDENT]

Wow! Thanks, Ladd. That has huge potential. It doesn't appear to look at the means (which are "comment" records for whatever reason), but it looks like it's got every observation in there. Here's a screen shot of a very small .rw5, so parsed:

Now it's just a matter of weeding out what I don't want, and consolidating multiple files in a single excel workbook.
Thanks again for the great link.:-)