Wave Names with , . etc. as part of the name

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Hello there community!
I have been using igorpro V 6.3 for about a year now and have always named my waves pretty arbitraily containing whatever pertineant information I feel like I need. For example, I have a whole slew of waves named things like:

6.0Max0.05Amps or current_0.004_6AMPS OR 3-16-19_.05

In the igorpro manual, it states that the program wont accept names with weird characters such as periods or semicolons and hyphens. Even for the naming convention when 'name' is done with apostrophes. I've used names like this for so long, but what boggles my mind is that they will always work fine and the progam will move them around, and then call on them, operate on them, make a new wave name with an added suffix, operate on them etc. These processes work 100% of the time with my wacky wave names. The only time when this kind of thing comes up is when I specifically try to move waves FROM root: to a different folder. They Move FROM another folder to ROOT, but moving them back, for some reason, gives my program a conniption and finally tells me "HEY I DON"T LIKE THOSE NAMES"

Any idea what's going on?

relavent code snippets
        Prompt currentfolder,"root:subfolder1:subfolder2: ... :subfolderN:" //Code asks for user input for location of a wave
        doPrompt "full path to currentwave", currentfolder
.
.
.
        setdatafolder $(currentfolder)
    //setdatafolder "root:currents"
    prompt currentstring, "Select Current from list of waves",popup wavelist("*",";","")
    doprompt "Pick a current wave name",currentstring   //program asks user to select a wave from the folder that was identified earlier.
    wave currentwave=$currentstring                             // Wave chosen is moved into Root: ( I set Data folder to The folder I wanted to move
        movewave currentwave, root:                       //from since movewave from the folder to root while being IN root was not working
        setdatafolder root:
.
.
.
       movewave 'currentwave',$currentfolder //i suspect this is the problem, but I can't figure out how to choose the string path I had the user
                                                                 //input earlier be the location of the move. It either won't move by saying the characters are bad, or
                                                                 // will move from root to root and rename the wave "currentfolder"
By putting single quotes around 'currentwave' you are asking Igor to move a wave literally called currentwave. Since it is a wave reference, just remove the single quotes.
John Weeks
WaveMetrics, Inc.
support@wavemetrics.com

December 13, 2017 at 04:30 pm - Permalink

If you use weird characters in wave names you are using the liberal wave naming scheme in igor. And from my experience not all third party code works with liberal wave names.

December 14, 2017 at 11:38 am - Permalink