spotfire plot list of elements - list

Question

I have a data table that has this format :
and I want to plot temperature to time, any idea how to do that ?

Answer 1

This can be done in a TERR data function. I don't know how comfortable you are integrating Spotfire with TERR, there is an intro video here for instance (demo starts from about minute 7):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtVltmmKWQs
With that in mind, I wrote the script without loading any library, so it is quite verbose and explicit, but hopefully simpler to follow step by step. I am sure there is a more elegant way, and there are better ways of making it flexible with column names, but this is a start.
Your input will be a data table (dt, the original data) and the output a new data table (dt.out, the transformed data). All column names (and some values) are addressed explicitly in the script (so if you change them it won't work).
#remove the []
dt$Values=gsub('\\[|\\]','',dt$Values)
#separate into two different data frames, one for time and one for temperature
dt.time=dt[dt$Description=='time',]
dt.temperature=dt[dt$Description=='temperature',]
#split the columns we want to separate into a list of vectors
dt2.time=strsplit(as.character(dt.time$Values),',')
dt2.temperature=strsplit(as.character(dt.temperature$Values),',')
#rearrange times
names(dt2.time)=dt.time$object
dt2.time=stack(dt2.time) #stack vectors
dt2.time$id=c(1:nrow(dt2.time)) #assign running id for merging later
colnames(dt2.time)[colnames(dt2.time)=='values']='time'
#rearrange temperatures
names(dt2.temperature)=dt.temperature$object
dt2.temperature=stack(dt2.temperature) #stack vectors
dt2.temperature$id=c(1:nrow(dt2.temperature)) #assign running id for merging later
colnames(dt2.temperature)[colnames(dt2.temperature)=='values']='temperature'
#merge time and temperature
dt.out=merge(dt2.time,dt2.temperature,by=c('id','ind'))
colnames(dt.out)[colnames(dt.out)=='ind']='object'
dt.out$time=as.numeric(dt.out$time)
dt.out$temperature=as.numeric(dt.out$temperature)
Gaia

Answer 2

because all of the example rows you've shown here contain exactly four list items and you haven't specified otherwise, I'll assume that all of the data fits this format.
with this assumption, it becomes pretty trivial, albeit a little messy, to split the values out into columns using the RXReplace() expression function.
you can create four calculated columns, each with an expression like:
Int(RXReplace([values],"\\[([\\d\\-]+),([\\d\\-]+),([\\d\\-]+),([\\d\\-]+)]","\\1",""))
the third argument "\\1" determines which number in the list to extract. backslashes are doubled ("escaped") per the requirements of the RXReplace() function.
note that this example assumes the numbers are all whole numbers. if you have decimals, you'd need to adjust each "phrase" of the regular expression to ([\\d\\-\\.]+), and you'd need to wrap the expression in Real() rather than Int() (if you leave this part out, the result will be a String type which could cause confusion later on when working with the data).
once you have the four columns, you'll be able to unpivot to get the data easily.