Getting event data as an Int but expecting a float? about flowio HOT 2 CLOSED

Hi Filipe,

This is the expected behavior. FlowIO returns event data exactly as it was encoded in the binary data section, so no pre-processing of any kind. In fact, it doesn't even reshape the data into channel columns. This is intentional so users can get the exact contents of the file and to keep the library free of any dependencies.

The FlowKit Sample class uses FlowIO to parse FCS files, but then does the proper pre-processing as specified in the metadata. This includes reshaping the single data column into the 2-D array (events, channels), as well applying any log display or gain for individual channel data. It also provides easy access to methods for applying compensation and transformations. All the event data arrays returned by the Sample class will be floating point data.

The TLDR version: Most users should use the FlowKit Sample class for analysis of event data. FlowIO is intended for low-level use in applications that want to minimize dependencies and take responsibility for proper event data conversion.

One final note: You can retrieve the original events in the FlowKit Sample class by setting the optional keyword keep_original_events to True when creating a Sample instance. See the API docs here. If that flag is set, then the unprocessed events are available via the Sample method get_events(source='orig'). The returned events should match the FlowIO values, though they will be conveniently reshaped to the useful 2-D NumPy array (they will still be floats but the values should match).

Hope this helps clear things up for you. Let me know if you have any additional questions.

Kind regards,
Scott

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