Lasvalidate output format change suggestion

[bobby riley]

Group,

    The XML output from lasvalidate is a little awkward, at least for me.

    What if the output were in the form of a .csv file, then it could be pulled into a spreadsheet program and easily scanned to determine if an issue is present?

Thanks,

Bobby

[Bernie Connors]

I would also be interested in CSV output for lasvalidate or perhaps a tool to parse the XML to a tabular format.  I have 30,000 LAS files to validate and it will be tedious to review or scan all of the XML documents.

Bernie.

[Antonio Ruiz]

Bernie,

Microsoft Excel is able to convert xml to tabular format:

 

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Map-XML-elements-to-cells-in-an-XML-Map-ddb23edf-f5c5-4fbf-b736-b3bf977a0c53

With LibreOffice Calc it is also possible to do.

https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Creating_XML_Filters

Toni

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[Howard Butler]

My only pushback on the lasvalidate output is it would be handy to have JSON output too. Other than that, I think it is a mistake to generate output from tools like lasvalidate or lasinfo in unstructured formats like CSV (or worse is stdout unstructured printf output that can change version-to-version). It just takes some simple manipulation (your language of choice) to reach into these data in programatic ways, and they allow many other things to built atop them without a horrid and fragile data translation step in the middle of data workflows.

If you have 30,000 LAS files to validate, you want a simple script that can shred that XML document into a SQL insert statement that captures what you want to query on. This would allow you to write SQL queries and interrogate for all the different ways LAS files can fall over.

My $0.02,

Howard