[CWB] Empty fields

Maarten Janssen maartenpt at gmail.com
Wed Jan 23 13:24:12 CET 2013


Hi all,

There is a "bug" in CQP 3.0.0 that probably hardly ever comes up in the typical use of CQP: when you have a column in your .vrt file for which all lines have an empty value (_ - as in the case of the fourth column in the example below), cwb-encode runs fine, but cwb-make quits after complaining about the empty column. To be precise, CWB::Indexer stops because cwb-huffcode fails (Problem: No output generated -- no items?), after which cwb-make chokes on the missing .huf file.

Now normally, there is no reason to have empty columns, and if there are any it is normally easy to remove them. But in the context in which I am using it, these files are built on-the-fly, and it is difficult to predict beforehand which columns are used and not. Does anyone know if there is any way to use a flag to ignore a column, like you do with -p for the word attribute? And/or has this quit-on-empty-column been solved in later versions of CQP? It would be a relatively easy change to make (the missing .huf file should not be crucial), but I'd rather not get into it if it has already been dealt with somehow.

kind regards,

Maarten Janssen

This	this	PRON	_	1
is	be	VRB	_	2
a	a	DET	_	3
little	little	ADJ	_	4
test	test	NOUN	_	5


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