Leading Zeros in Output Files

[christianhauschel]

It would be better if the output files (.vtk, h5, xmf, ...) of run_simulation had leading zeros by default for Paraview.

In the meantime, I think I will write a script that renames all result files.

[EdoAlvarezR]

You mean, something along the lines of 000-mysimulation.0.vtk, 001-mysimulation.1.vtk, and so on? Or more along the lines of mysimulation.000.vtk, mysimulation.001.vtk, and so on?

Could you explain more the motivation for this?

[christianhauschel]

The latter.
ParaView does not support natural sorting, but lexicographical. So leading zeros would help to import sequences of data in the correct order.

It could be an option in the run_simulation:

run_simulation(nsteps, ...; ..., n_leading_zeros=nothing)

  if n_leading_zeros === nothing
    n_leading_zeros = ndigits(nsteps) +2 # add some margin for more steps in future
  end

  fname = lpad(string(10), n_leading_zeros, "0")
  println(fname)

end

[EdoAlvarezR]

That's odd. I have never run into issues with ParaView being able to sort time steps from the format mysimulation.0.vtk, mysimulation.1.vtk, ... mysimulation.100.vtk. and so on. What operative system and version of ParaView are you using?

[cibinjoseph]

Although I've not had this problem, I think this might happen when Paraview is built with Qt4.
Ref discussion

[christianhauschel]

Win11, Paraview 5.12