[Coin-discuss] MPS format change

[Lou Hafer]

Samik,

	My understanding of writeMps is that it in fact does exactly the
opposite: it looks at the data to be written, and the numeric format, and
then decides whether to use fixed or free format.

	What you ask --- conversion of free format to fixed format by forcing
the use of fixed format --- would be problematic for at least two reasons:
possible loss of numeric accuracy due to truncation and possible loss of
unique names due to truncation. The second is an annoying technical detail.
The first has the potential to produce a substantially different LP problem.

	OsiGlpk uses the COIN readMps routine, so it should not have problems
with free format MPS files. If you'll settle for a comparison using Netlib
problems, you might want to have a look at the OSI unitTest, which can run a
selection of solvers for comparison. It would be fairly straightforward to
replace the Netlib problems with MPS files of your choosing. None of this
addresses lp_solve, however.

	An awk script might be your best bet, if you have a number of MPS
files to convert.
	
							Lou