Error when LAS data contains text with spaces enclosed in double quotes

I am encountering an error trying to load a LAS file that has a paramaeter that sometimes contains spaces. This seem to occur for many LAS files that contain picks: the pick name is a text field which may contain spaces.

It is possible to replace these spaces with underscores, or something like that?

Here’s an example LAS file:

~Version
 VERS              .         2.0                           : CWLS LOG ASCII STANDARD - VERSION 2.0
 WRAP              .         NO                            : ONE LINE PER DEPTH STEP
 DLM               .         SPACE                         : DELIMITING CHARACTER(SPACE TAB OR COMMA)
~Well Information
#_______________________________________________________________________________
#
#PARAMETER_NAME    .UNIT     VALUE                         : DESCRIPTION
#_______________________________________________________________________________
STRT               .m        321.16                        : First reference value
STOP               .m        3188.59                       : Last reference value
STEP               .m        0                             : Step increment
NULL               .         -9999                         : Missing value
WELL               .         xxx                           : Well name
~Curve Information
#_______________________________________________________________________________
#
#LOGNAME           .UNIT     LOG_ID                        : DESCRIPTION
#_______________________________________________________________________________
MD                 .m                                      :  
ZONE               .unitless                               :  
~Ascii
321.16     pick_alpha
1753.2     pick_beta    
1953.5     "pick gamma"      
2141.05    "pick delta"    
2185.34    pick_epsilon

Here is what I get from LASIO

# Try to load data as pandas table
las = lasio.read('data/test_file.las')
las.df()

The result is badly parsed:

	ZONE
MD	
321.16	pick_alpha
1753.2	pick_beta
1953.5	"pick
gamma"	2141.05
"pick	delta"
2185.34	pick_epsilon

PS thanks for your work on the library so far, it is proving tremendously useful!

[kinverarity1]

@Connossor I have changed the data section code to split into items while respecting quoted strings. Hopefully that fixes the original issue you raised, although obviously other NULL values are still being ignored per @Anjum48’s comment. I’ve opened #422 to deal with that.

[Anjum48]

At the moment, if one or more of the columns are non-numeric, the NULL_POLICY fails to replace missing values with np.nan.

This is because when the below array is created https://github.com/kinverarity1/lasio/blob/817fb82914cbe62009f651340ebec51fbb466174/lasio/reader.py#L456-L458 the array will be of type string (<U32), and the missing numbers in lasio.defaults.NULL_SUBS won’t be matched, since we are comparing as string e.g. "-999" against a number like -999.