Version 1 (modified by dac, 8 years ago) (diff)

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Q: How do I convert between LAS and ASCII file formats?

To convert between LAS and ASCII formats use the free las2txt and txt2las available as part of LAStools available to download from: https://github.com/LAStools/LAStools (note: download also contains paid for tools not required for conversion). Binaries are provided for Windows. For Linux and OS X you need to compile using the included 'Makefile'

LAS to ASCII

To export as 9 column ASCII files, as delivered by ARSF between 2011 and 2015 use the following command:

las2txt -parse txyzicrna -sep space -i in_las.las -o out_ascii.txt

If you need to export in the 8 column format used by ARSF between 2009 and 2010 use the following command instead:

las2txt -parse txyzicrna -sep space -i in_las.las -o out_ascii.txt

For more details on available options see the las2txt README

ASCII to LAS

To convert the 9 column ASCII files as delivered by ARSF between 2011 and 2015 to LAS format use the following command:

txt2las -iparse txyzicrna -i in_ascii.txt -o out_las.las

To convert the 8 column format used by ARSF between 2009 and 2010 use the following command instead:

txt2las -iparse txyzicra -i in_ascii.txt -o out_las.las

To reduce the file size you can change the extension of the output file to '.laz' to save as LASzip files. These can be read by a number of packages and easily converted back to uncompressed LAS files using laszip.

If you are accessing ARSF archive data LAStools are available on JASMIN and can be loaded using:

module load contrib/arsf/lastools/20150925

Allowing data to be converted to LAS/LAZ format before downloading.

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