Linking to C type short?

On 12-07-26 4:22 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:

Hello, All:


        What references exist on how to link to C?


        I'm familiar with sections 5.2 and 5.6 of the "Writing R
Extension" manual plus chapter 6 of Venables and Ripley (2000) S
Programming (Springer).  From these, I get the following:


R storage mode   C type
logical          int *
integer          int *
double           double *
complex          Rcomplex *
character        char **
raw              unsigned char *
list             SEXP *
R object         SEXP


        "integer" and "int" are 32 bits.  If I understand correctly,
"short" has only 16 bits = 2 bytes.

I imagine that depends on the platform and compiler.

        Should I define any "short" vector in C as a matrix with 2 rows
of type either "raw" or "char"?

What do you want to do with it in R?  If you want to use .C() and just 
want it to be an opaque blob, then a raw vector is probably best.  
Have one C function that figures out the size in bytes of the blob, 
then allocate a raw vector of that size, and call a different function 
to fill it in (or the same function with different arguments...). If 
you actually want to work with the short values, then you'll need to 
convert them to a type that R understands, most likely int (but double 
would work too).

I have DICOM (.dcm) files from Computed Tomography (CT scans).  
It sounds like readDICOMFile{oro.dicom} should be able to read this.  
Unfortunately, it won't, because my particular DICOM files have images 
stored as lossless JPEG, which is not readable by the current version of 
oro.dicom.  I'm working to fix this deficiency with Brandon Whichter, 
project admin for oro.dicom and related packages.


       An example of such an image file is available from the R-Forge 
version of oro.dicom:


install.packages("oro.dicom", repos= c("http://R-Forge.R-project.org", 
getOption("repos")))
library(oro.dicom)
jpgIn.dcmFile <- system.file('jpeg/cervicalKyphosis.dcm',
                             package='oro.dicom')
str(dcm <- readDICOMFile(jpgIn.dcmFile))


       dcm$hdr provides information needed to decode the data in the 
rest of the file, returned as dcm$img in this developmental version of 
oro.dicom.  Row 39 tells us the data type:


 > dcm$hdr[39,]
    group element                  name code length
39  0008    2111 DerivationDescription   ST     36
                                   value sequence
39 2:1 JPEGLOSSLESSPROCFIRSTORDERREDICT


       Brandon Whichter said that the information required to decode 
this type of dcm file is available in Kongji Huang and Brian Smith 
(1994) "Lossless JPEG Codec", v. 1.0 <URL: 
ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/multimed/ljpg.tar.Z>.  One way to use this 
might be to install this software so it is accessible from a commands 
prompt as "ljpgtopnm foo.ljpg foo.ppm", where "foo.ljpg" is an image 
file in lossless JPEG format and foo.ppm is a name for the desired 
decompressed output file.


       However, rather than try to invoke a systems command from within 
R, I though it might be better to study the algorithm more carefully.  
This identified a function DecodeImage in C++ or C, which takes an 
argument of class DecompressInfo.  I thought I would try to create this 
DecompressInfo argument from the information available in dcm$hdr, then 
call DecodeImage (compiled C++ or C) from R.


       I don't know if it's better to use .Call or .C.


       Thanks,
       Spencer

If you want to use the .Call interface, there are some other choices, 
e.g. external pointers.

Duncan Murdoch

        Thanks,
        Spencer


p.s.  I need this to link to lossless JPEG code obtained from
"ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/multimed/ljpg.tar.Z"