Rename wires

Well, I'm going to show my Unix bias here, but there are a *lot* of tools available to do things like this built in to Linux and OS X and available for Windows.  It depends how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole!

My first reaction would be to use "sed" the stream editor.  (Do a search for "sed for windows".)  Sed is used at the command line, and takes some input, modifies it, and sends it to some output.  For example,

sed 's/W500/W512' schematic.sch > newschematic.sch

which would change occurrences of W500 to W512 and create a new file called newschematic.sch without changing the original schematic.sch.  To make sure things look good, you could use the "diff" command on the two files to see exactly what was changed.  Of course, you wouldn't want to have to change that command line and re-run it for every substitution you want to make, so it's better to create a sed script file with all the commands you want (somewhat analogous to that CSV file in the referenced article), and then run the command:

sed -f script.file schematic.sch > newschematic.sch

Sed is a great tool and can be used over and over again without having to modify and recompile.  Now, if you want to learn something a little more sophisticated, there is a simple, yet amazing text processing language called AWK.  AWK knows how to read in a text file line by line, split the line into words and do things to those words.  You can do more testing and manipulating than you can in sed.  AWK is very much like the C programming language, so you can do things like printf to create new output.  Then, if you want to really go down the rabbit hole and get into more powerful scripting languages, the big three in my book are PERL, Python and Ruby.  Each has strengths and weaknesses and each has devout followers and detractors.  Let me know if you're interested or do a search to learn more...

BTW, if you don't want to download and install any of these unix tools, you might consider using Windows PowerShell too...

Thank you for your help.

after some tests I found out that Win doesn't like the following command:

sed 's/W500/W5000' 30c.sch 30d.sch

But the following seems to work so far (thank you google):

sed "s/W500/W5000/" 30c.sch 30d.sch

Well, first everything seems to work fine, it reads and schows all data in the 30c file, but after everything has finished, the 30d.sch is still empty. Any idea what I am doing wrong? Sorry I have to admit that I'm not the shell-guy...

As for the advice with the inconsistent board: Thank you for your advice, but there is no board, only the schematic. It is the shematic of my newly build camper. I know, eagle may not be the best solution for doing that, but works so far ok for me...

You need a greater than sign before the last file name.  The greater than sign is basically an arrow pointing to where the output should go...

small thing, big consequences...thank you very much, I missed that one. Now everything works perfectly. In combination with the script file it is very powerfull.

For a more complex rename I'm now looking for a solution as well. Lets asume we have the following net names:

W100/1.5RD

W101/1.5RD

W102/50RD

W103/50BK

W104/1.5OR

W105/xxxx

...

W150/1.5RD

W151/1.5OR

These names are in no order somewhere in the schematic. Is it possible to sort these so that the first W1xx is on page 1 and so on. Important; the numbers and letters after the slash should not be changed. So for example if W150/1.5RD is changed to W103 it should still have the /1.5RD at the end. The "old" W103 may then become W104/50BK, W104 is changed to W105/1.5OR and so on...Hope you understand what I'd like to do.

Thank you very much for the great help.

My suggestions so far have been based on treating the schematic file as one big stream of text.  (That is what Unix was originally designed for, to process streams of text.). When we need to start thinking about the structures in a file, we need to use a different type of tool.

There are two categories of solution that come to mind.  We can either try to use the tools that are built in to EAGLE, or we can use one of those scripting languages I mentioned.  It's a trade off between specific knowledge and general applicability.  Are you more interested in learning more about EAGLE or learning how to write scripts that can apply to other programming problems?

Let's assume that you just want to get this problem solved, so we'll use available tools for this task and not reinvent anything.  EAGLE has a command prompt right there on the screen.  You can type commands instead of selecting them with a mouse.  Just for grins, when you have your schematic open, type "win fit" and press the enter key.  Just like a sed file, or an operating system batch file, you can put a series of these commands into an EAGLE script file and run it.  If you use a particular script a lot, you can assign it to a key or add it to a menu.  This is what makes EAGLE so appealing to an old Unix guy like me!

More in a bit.  I can't stand using this iPad to type...

Now interestingly enough, The EAGLE scripting language doesn't have any control structures.  That means there is no way to test things, or repeat things, other than to duplicate a line x number of times.  EAGLE scripts are just brute-force lists of commands to run.

So, for whatever reason, the Cadsoft folks decided to leave the scripting alone and add a different programming language to create scripts.  This is called "User Language" and you create User Language Programs (ULPs).  The interesting thing about ULPs is that they don't get to change things while they run, they have to generate EAGLE scripts that you run after the ULP is complete.  In some ways, this is a very Unix-like thing to do.  And I'm part German, (born in Frankfurt actually), so I have the in-group privilege to say it's a very German thing too!  LOL

SIDE NOTE: It would be amazingly cool if Cadsoft made all of the EAGLE commands available as library functions that could be called by other languages.  Personally, I'd love it if I could start up a Python program, import an EAGLE library and directly manipulate a schematic or board! 

So, anyway, User Language is very powerful, it knows about the structures in EAGLE files.  This saves *lots* of time!  You can write a ULP that works with the schematic, the board, a library, or parts of any of them.

I'm not sure I know *exactly* what you're trying to do, but my first interpretation is that you want to renumber wires based upon which page of the schematic they are on.  So, in a ULP, we would start by using the schematic, then looping through each page of the schematic.  The code to do that would be:

schematic(S){

  S.sheets(SH){

     // do something here

  }

}

The first line says we're going to work with the schematic and call it "S".  The next line says, take S, and go through each sheet in it one at a time and call it "SH" while we're using it.  I took a quick look at the EAGLE help, and I found that you can go through each wire of the sheet by adding:

schematic(S){

  S.sheets(SH){

    SH.wires(W){

      // do something with each wire here

    }

  }

}

But the problem seems to be that the name of each wire is not listed in the data members of the UL_WIRE structure.  I'm guessing we'll have to loop through something different, like nets() maybe:

schematic(S){

  S.sheets(SH){

    SH.nets(N){

      // do something with each net here

    }

  }

}

This illustrates the toughest part of writing a ULP, figuring out the parent-child relationships of all the structures.  Once you get the structure correct, then at the "do something" point, we output the command that does the actual rename.

I apologize, but I must depart for the day, my son turned 19 today and we have a party to prepare for.  I hope I've given you some hints as to how you might proceed.  I'm not sure, but I think I'd probably look at looping through segments() and labels() next.  Everything is documented in EAGLE help.  If you want to directly access the file with your web browser the way I do, open the file eagle_en.htm in the bin directory of your EAGLE installation, or you can get to the help files on my web site at http://analognotes.com/eagle/helpfiles/

If you learn from reading other people's code, go to the Cadsoft ULP download site and search for "renumber"...

Now interestingly enough, The EAGLE scripting language doesn't have any control structures.  That means there is no way to test things, or repeat things, other than to duplicate a line x number of times.  EAGLE scripts are just brute-force lists of commands to run.

So, for whatever reason, the Cadsoft folks decided to leave the scripting alone and add a different programming language to create scripts.  This is called "User Language" and you create User Language Programs (ULPs).  The interesting thing about ULPs is that they don't get to change things while they run, they have to generate EAGLE scripts that you run after the ULP is complete.  In some ways, this is a very Unix-like thing to do.  And I'm part German, (born in Frankfurt actually), so I have the in-group privilege to say it's a very German thing too!  LOL

SIDE NOTE: It would be amazingly cool if Cadsoft made all of the EAGLE commands available as library functions that could be called by other languages.  Personally, I'd love it if I could start up a Python program, import an EAGLE library and directly manipulate a schematic or board! 

So, anyway, User Language is very powerful, it knows about the structures in EAGLE files.  This saves *lots* of time!  You can write a ULP that works with the schematic, the board, a library, or parts of any of them.

I'm not sure I know *exactly* what you're trying to do, but my first interpretation is that you want to renumber wires based upon which page of the schematic they are on.  So, in a ULP, we would start by using the schematic, then looping through each page of the schematic.  The code to do that would be:

schematic(S){

  S.sheets(SH){

     // do something here

  }

}

The first line says we're going to work with the schematic and call it "S".  The next line says, take S, and go through each sheet in it one at a time and call it "SH" while we're using it.  I took a quick look at the EAGLE help, and I found that you can go through each wire of the sheet by adding:

schematic(S){

  S.sheets(SH){

    SH.wires(W){

      // do something with each wire here

    }

  }

}

But the problem seems to be that the name of each wire is not listed in the data members of the UL_WIRE structure.  I'm guessing we'll have to loop through something different, like nets() maybe:

schematic(S){

  S.sheets(SH){

    SH.nets(N){

      // do something with each net here

    }

  }

}

This illustrates the toughest part of writing a ULP, figuring out the parent-child relationships of all the structures.  Once you get the structure correct, then at the "do something" point, we output the command that does the actual rename.

I apologize, but I must depart for the day, my son turned 19 today and we have a party to prepare for.  I hope I've given you some hints as to how you might proceed.  I'm not sure, but I think I'd probably look at looping through segments() and labels() next.  Everything is documented in EAGLE help.  If you want to directly access the file with your web browser the way I do, open the file eagle_en.htm in the bin directory of your EAGLE installation, or you can get to the help files on my web site at http://analognotes.com/eagle/helpfiles/

If you learn from reading other people's code, go to the Cadsoft ULP download site and search for "renumber"...

I think my last and your last posts just crossed each other. Anyway.

I think you understood me a bit wrong. I don't want to rename based on the page number.

Right now I have the following (just an example):

                           Now                       Should be

W100/1.5RD  on page 27                  1. W1xx wire on page 01

W101/1.5RD  on page 32                  2. W1xx wire on page 01

W102/50RD  on page 01                   3. W1xx wire on page 01

W103/50BK  on page 45                   1. W1xx wire on page 02

W104/1.5OR  on page 26                 2. W1xx wire on page 02

W105/xxxx  on page 14                    1. W1xx wire on page 03

...                                                     ...

W149/1.5OR  on page 06                  5. W1xx wire on page 26

W150/1.5OR  on page 01                  1. W1xx wire on page 27

Now the old W100 (on page 27) will be renamed to, W150 (assumed it is the 150iest W1xx wire in the shematic). But the last part of the name should be kept as it was before. The last part of the name is the dimension and the color of the wire, so it should stick to that wire where it is right now. So new we would have:

W100/1.5OR  on page 01 (because the wire on Page 01 is a 1.5OR)

W150/1.5RD  on page 27 (because the wire on page 27 is a 1.5RD)

I'll have a look at your sources...and try around a little bit. Happy birthday to your son and have a nice party.

Btw. we could also write in german ;-) I've just chosen English because I tought the chances to find an Eagle crack would be bigger. Not sure if that would be apreciated if we go on in german. German would be easier, but at the end is also a foreign language for me. So its up to you...

While writing I just got another idea: I use sed to change all W1xx to W999 (or something else). I would then get W9900, W99901, W99902... Then I would only need a solution how to rename all the W999xx in the script one after the other to W100, W101... Then I get W100xx, W101xx, after that just delete the xx part. Not sure if sed can do that, and if it can how. Probably to simple? I may run in trouble on that wires who start on one page and continue on diferent other pages...?

Thank you