Graphics, Figures & Tables ⇒ Including external data in tabular

[ChoKamir]

Hi,

I have a table in my latex document and a file with is filled from an external program with the data to be included in the table. The file is already formatted correctly (ie. contains the & as column seperation and the \\ as row seperation).

Latex returns an error if i try something like

Code: Select all

\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{x *{4}{c}}
\input(output.txt}
\end{tablularx}

Is there a way to do this include automatically, or is the only way to copy and paste the data in the latex file by hand everytime?

Thanks,

ChoKamir

[west.logan]

Without a MWE I have a couple of suggestions:

First, there are a couple of packages that will populate tables from CSV files, if that was the original format.

Second, if you've formatted the input table by hand or by script, you could add the table commands directly to the top and the bottom of your input file so that when you import, you're importing the whole table, commands and all, i.e.,

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Text
\input{table} %entire table, with begin and end commands are in the file
Text

Third, if there are too many tables to really do this, or if the tables are automatically generated, you could put your table preamble and ending into two separate input files, so you would end up with something like this:

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Text
\input{tablebegin} %table start code
\input{table} %table raw data
\input{tableend} %table end code
Text

The only bad part of this last one is if your tables have different numbers of columns. Then you would need to have a separate input file for each etc. But with this last method, you could just do a find and replace all "\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{x *{4}{c}}" with "\input{tablebegin}" and replace all "end{tabularx}} with "\input{tableend}" You might even get away with leaving the "\end{tabularx}" in place.

[west.logan]

Also, make sure the error goes away once you manually put the input data in. It might be something in your preamble that is throwing the error, and not the attempted use of "\input{}"