get pointcloud information

[wiesehahn]

I am wondering if it would make sense to add some option to get further pointcloud information.

As far as I can see we currently have summarise() which provides information about point data records for an in-memory pointcloud, and we have info() which provides information about a las/laz file on disk.

Would it make sense to extend info() to print additional information which is available in the header, e.g. to get the point data format?
I know we could use lidR::readLASheader(), but initially I expected info() to provide this information as well.

[Jean-Romain]

lasR is not (no longer) tight to the LAS format. It is more generic and is supposed to load any point cloud from any supported format. Internally the way the point cloud is handled in memory is much more generic than the LAS format.

Thus it does not provide information about a las/laz file on disk but about a generic point cloud read from a source. The concept of point data record format is specific to LAS and does not exist in the PCD format for instance. This is consequently not an information retained internally.

This is not technically impossible but I'd like to write less and less LAS specific code in lasR. This is why this feature has been lost in 0.13.0. This is also why a generic reader() supersedes reader_las(). Ultimately you will be able to write translation pipelines like the following because internally a point cloud is a point cloud and the input format is not retained.

pipeline = reader() + write_pcd()
exec(pipeline, on = "file.las")