Opening IMD save files (.sav) without IDL

[Markus Kraemer]

Hi David (or the others),

is it possible to open an IMD save file (.sav) if I am are not running IMD under IDL but as an XOP extension? I saw that it is some kind of binary file, which gives be useless results when I open it with an editor (of course) but is the a chance (e.g. a small program) that I can convert it to something readable (ASCII) which I could use for further calculations with another program?

Thanks,
 Markus

[51517...@gmail.com]

Hi,

   First of all, thanks David for creating such an amazing software and sharing it to everybody. It does help a lot in the research of the X-ray field. Thanks a lot!

I have the same question about opening a .sav file without an IDL. To export a calculation result, there is an option to convert the result into a .txt file. However, for the field calculation results, only the data at fixed incident angle or at certain depth of the layer system can be exported at one time. It looks like if I want to have the entire data of the field intensities as a function of the incident angle and penetration depth, the only option is to use the "Export Results to IDL SAVE File" function. The difficulty is, currently I don't have a license in IDL and probably won't have it in the future due to the budget issue. There is also a .sav file format in SPSS so I try to open the file in SPSS, but it fails.

   Is there other way to do this?  It really helps a lot if we can convert the data to ASCII files for further data analysis. 

Thanks a lot and have a great day!

Yu-shan

[David Windt]

It looks like there's now a Python module that can read IDL Save files without IDL:

http://astrofrog.github.io/idlsave/

I haven't tried it myself, but perhaps you can let us know if it works?

David