Hi everyone,
I'm new to this forum and EPMA, having just done some analyses this year as part of my Bsc(Hons) thesis project.
I've written a python script to take PFE output files and separate them into separate files for each sample and mineral that I analyse per run, and then plot up Oxide Wt%, Element Mol % etc. etc. for each mineral.
The naming of columns in the output file has a couple little things that might be worth pointing out.
1) the %ERR column names have a space after %ERR! It took me a while to de-bug this, so if anyone else is writing a data processing script this might be something worth being aware of.
2) I found the column naming system for Element W%, Oxide Wt%, Element mol% and Oxide mol% a little inconsistent.
Element W% is X % (where X is the element)
Oxide Wt% is XO % (so far so good)
Element mol% is X AT%
Oxide mol% is X OXMOL%
Particularly in my case where the user inputs the the oxides they wish to plot, the situation where the column title for Oxide Mol% actually uses the element, not the oxide, just complicates things a little because I needed to write a dictionary to map all possible oxides to their elements (apparently the namers of elements didn't have future script-writers in mind either when they chose single and double letter names for elements). The other option would be to write a function where it converts the oxide to the element by taking all letters before with a number or O.
Anyway, its probably worth keeping these in the output files for backwards compatibility with any other scripts that might be out there, but I just thought I'd share my experiences.
To post in-line images, login and click on the Gallery link at the top