plycpp: a simple C++ library to import/export Polygon File Format data.

This library intends to provide an easy to use solution to manipulate PLY files in C++.

If you are looking for a more complete alternative and are not interested by C++ syntactic sugar, you may want to have a look at:

• ply_io, the C library developped by Greg Turk (http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/c_src/plycpp/plycpp.html)
• RPly, an other C library developed by Diego Nehab (http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/rply/)

Features

• Easy to install: Add "hdr/plycpp.h" and "src/plycpp.cpp" to your project and you are ready to go (or use CMake and a Git submodule if you prefer).
• Load PLY files in ASCII and Binary mode.
• Save PLY data in ASCII and Binary mode.
• Handle arbitrary elements and properties.
• Safety mechanisms to check data type in Debug mode.
• ParsingException triggered if anything goes wrong.

Syntax example

See src/example.cpp for a full example.

Current limitations

• Property lists have to contain exactly 3 values per element, and be indexed by a "uchar" type. For typical use, this means that only triangular meshes are supported.
• Decoding of binary files encoded with an endianness different of the one of the current architecture is not yet implemented.

Compilers supported

This code should be supported by any C++11 compliant compiler. Tested with Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2017.