# Finding the argument set for internal functions in Mathematica v9.0

I've recently run into a problem with importing TIF stacks in Mathematica: Slow import of multigigabyte TIF image stacks

On the advice of Simon Woods and others, I've been looking into the behavior for functions internal to Import, specifically:

ImageImportExportDumpImageReadTiledTIFF[]
ImageImportExportDumpImageReadTileTIFF[]


However, I can't seem to find the correct argument set to provide to these functions, and thus, I have no way of seeing how they behave. Just the fact that these functions can be found using ?*`TIFF surprised me (note: you need to add a pair of asterisks, *, around "TIFF" because here, they're being treating it as a formatting instruction and not appearing in the post).

Is there any way for me to elucidate the array of arguments that needs to be passed to either function?

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As noted in the resulting messages, these expect either 2 or 3, and 4 arguments, respectively. However, there is no general method to find out what those arguments are expected to be. –  Oleksandr R. Jul 14 '13 at 19:50
@OleksandrR. Well, I've spent over an hour trying everything I can think of, and even attempted feeding in an RNG for integers in different formats. –  Sparse Pine Jul 14 '13 at 20:13
Well, on second thought, you could hook these functions to make them print out the calls that are actually made to them. Though far from a full specification, some working examples may help considerably in your analysis. –  Oleksandr R. Jul 14 '13 at 20:22
@OleksandrR. Hmm, the problem though is - I have no idea how to trigger Mathematica to call them. I could sequentially go through each Import option, however. –  Sparse Pine Jul 14 '13 at 20:31
That will be the main problem, I agree. Unfortunately I don't think there's a good way to get around it. –  Oleksandr R. Jul 14 '13 at 20:44