MeshFileReader/VTKPolyDataMeshIO hangs forever on non-numeric chars in "POINTS" section (including "Infinity" and "NaN")

[N-Dekker]

Description

It appears that MeshFileReader hangs forever when trying to read an ASCII .vtk file that has non-numeric chars in "POINTS" section (using VTKPolyDataMeshIO). Even when the file was created by MeshFileWriter, using VTKPolyDataMeshIO as well. This may happen when some of the coordinates of the points has a NaN or an infinite value.

Note than MeshFileReader does correctly process reading NaN and infinite values from a binary .vtk file. So the issue only occurs with non-binary (ASCII) .vtk files.

Steps to Reproduce

#include "itkMesh.h"
#include "itkMeshFilereader.h"
#include "itkMeshFileWriter.h"

int
main()
{
  using MeshType = itk::Mesh<int>;
  using NumericLimits = std::numeric_limits<float>;
  const auto inputMesh = MeshType::New();
  inputMesh->SetPoint(0, itk::MakePoint(42.0f, NumericLimits::infinity(), NumericLimits::quiet_NaN()));
  itk::WriteMesh(inputMesh, "fileName.vtk");

  auto outputMesh = itk::ReadMesh<MeshType>("fileName.vtk"); // <== hangs forever...!
}

VTK file created by itk::WriteMesh(inputMesh, "fileName.vtk"):

# vtk DataFile Version 2.0
File written by itkPolyDataMeshIO
ASCII
DATASET POLYDATA
POINTS 1 float
42 Infinity NaN

Expected behavior

• MeshFileReader should be able to read any file by created by MeshFileWriter, so it should interpret "Infinity" as the floating point value infinity, and "NaN" as Not-A-Number.
• In other cases, when the "POINTS" section has non-numeric characters, MeshFileReader should throw an exception, rather than just hanging forever.

Actual behavior

MeshFileReader hangs inside the while loop within itk::VTKPolyDataMeshIO::ReadPointsBufferAsASCII, at

ITK/Modules/IO/MeshVTK/include/itkVTKPolyDataMeshIO.h

Line 201 in 9ed9070

while (!inputFile.eof())

Reproducibility

100%

Versions

Latest revision at the master: 9ed9070

Additional Information

I think I'm able to fix it 😃

[jhlegarreta]

Not sure if I'm mixing things (sorry if that is the case), but there seem to be various issues with the mesh-related classes that might all be related to each other (at least, if issues are in the base class; or some pattern was re-used across child-specific implementations), including this one.

I did also experience the timeout issue in here:
https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium/ITK/pull/3403/files#diff-4cd806c78c70c7e6a870aca2a24bced46565305bcf0562e4ca81c975e71a7c3dR142

that raised issue #3455.

and maybe your comment (?)
#3538 (comment)

and maybe Pranjal's #3526, as well as his comment in #3515 (comment)

Unfortunately, my investigations at that time did not lead me to any relevant conclusion about the source of the problem.

[N-Dekker]

Thanks @jhlegarreta but this particular issue is specifically about reading, and specifically about reading the ASCII file type. So I do think the problems you're pointing at are unrelated to this particular one. Even if all of them are Mesh IO related! Thanks anyway Jon!

I'm preparing a PR now, for this particular issue. Please wait 😃