sorting mesh data an from abaqus simulation

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:10:15 -0200, Alessandro Zivelonghi
<zasaconsulting at gmail.com> escribió:

> *Ntop = odb.rootAssembly.instances['PART-1-1'].nodeSets['TOP'].nodes
> *
> Problem:
> 1) the list of nodes Ntop contains all the node labels [2673,   2675,
> 2676,   2677,   2678,   3655,   3656, 119939, 124154, 127919] already
> ordered in ascending order.
> What I need is the same list *ordered by coordinate_x* of each node, i.e.
> from left to right in the model (unfortunately, for example node 124154
> cames before node 3656 in the model, if you read the model from left to
> right)

Use the key= argument to the sorted() builtin function
<http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#sorted>

def get_node_x(node):
    return node.coordinates[0]

sorted_nodes = sorted(Ntop, key=get_node_x)

(For a list of reasonable size, that's fine. For a giant list, this could
be written more efficiently, although less readable)

> 1b) I don't understand which kind of data are EL, N, Ntop (list?) and how
> can I sort Ntop  with the criterium based on coordinate_x (coordinate[0])

AFAIK those are plain lists. You can try:

py> print type(Ntop)

and see what happens. If you don't get <type 'list'>, try with:

py> type(Ntop).mro()

to see the chain of base classes.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina