5.9 NETFILES

If the symbol WFDB_NETFILES is defined at the time the WFDB library is compiled, then input files located on remote web (HTTP) and FTP servers can be read directly. This capability is implemented using the libcurl library (which is available on many of the platforms supported by the WFDB library). NETFILES support, if available, is transparent to WFDB applications. To make use of this feature, simply link to the NETFILES-enabled WFDB library (the necessary libcurl functions will be loaded automatically), and incorporate one or more URL prefixes in the WFDB path.

In current versions of the WFDB library, the default WFDB path (defined in the WFDB library source file wfdblib.h, and used as the WFDB path if the WFDB environment variable is undefined) is ‘. /usr/database http://physionet.org/physiobank/database’. (The second component, after the ‘.’ that specifies the current directory, may vary, depending on your platform and the choices made during installation.) The third component is a URL prefix pointing to PhysioBank, an on-line archive for a wide variety of standard databases of physiologic signals. For example, the MIT-BIH Polysomnographic Database is kept in http://physionet.org/physiobank/database/slpdb, so it is possible to read record slp37 of that database directly from PhysioBank by passing slpdb/slp37 as the record argument to wfdbinit (or isigopen, annopen, etc.).

The current implementation of libcurl permits input from http:// URLs in much the same way that local files are read, provided that the remote web server supports HTTP 1.1 range requests (most, including PhysioNet’s, do). This means that it is not necessary to download an entire file in order to examine part of it, and you may notice little or no speed difference between local file and network file input for many applications. If the remote server does not support range requests, however, or if input is from an ftp:// URL, the current implementations download the entire file to memory, so you may notice a significant startup delay if the file is long and your network connection is slow, or if the file does not fit into physical memory.

Currently, NETFILES support is limited to input files; as always, any output files created by the WFDB library are written into the current directory, unless the record name contains local path information.

NETFILES support was introduced in WFDB library version 10.0.1.