Material import broken in 2024 R2.3

- January 7, 2025 at 8:36 am
  
  joel.s.lehikoinen
  Subscriber
  
  I recently upgraded my Lumerical installation from 2023 R1.3 to 2024 R2.3. After the upgrade, I noticed that importing materials using sampled (n, k) data no longer works as expected. The issue seems to be in the underlying readdata function, which does not work as expected. Taking the example file on this page, and running ?readdata on it produces the following output:
  
  result:
  0 3
  1 2
  2 4
  3 3
  This is clearly wrong; it seems that readdata only reads the integer part of each number and ignores everything after the decimal point.
  I am running Lumerical on Ubuntu, if that is relevant.
  Needless to say, but this is a massive bug, which prevents me from running any (relevant) simulations due to not being able to use imported materials. I would have reported it directly to Ansys, if I had the means to do that.
- January 7, 2025 at 3:57 pm
  Kirill
  Forum Moderator
  Dear Subscriber,
  1. Please review the following topic: readdata script not working in Lumerical 2024 R2.3. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to debug this issue as I cannot reproduce it. The readdata script command works correctly on both my Windows and Linux installations. Which version of Ubuntu do you use?
  2. Could you check your locale settings? Is there a chance that your system uses a comma as a decimal separator?
  Best regards,
  Kirill
- March 13, 2025 at 8:15 am
  
  joel.s.lehikoinen
  Subscriber
  
  Dear Kirill, sorry I missed your original response, apparently the forum doesn't send email notifications about responses to threads. Thank you for the link, it seems that the decimal separator is the culprit here: my system had comma (,) as the decimal separator, but when I changed that, it worked. Nonetheless, I think this is a bug in Lumerical that should be fixed, as it is quite common in scientific work to use the period as the decimal separator in one's files, even if the system locale is set to use comma.
- March 13, 2025 at 4:25 pm
  
  Kirill
  Forum Moderator
  
  Dear Subscriber,
  I'm glad you were able to resolve the issue.
  I agree, there are always a lot of possibilities for improvement. You can contribute by submitting your idea at the Lumerical Ideas Exchange.
  Best regards,
  Kirill