File Formats

Overview
Many EMSE files are stored in ASCII format. This permits the data to be accessed with any appropriate text editor or spreadsheet program. For EMSE to read the files correctly, the file formats described below must be obeyed strictly.

File Structure

File names
File and directory names must be consistent with operating system naming conventions, but are otherwise at the discretion of the user.

Extensions
File name extensions (.xxx) are mandatory. Extensions for different data types are shown in Table A-1.

Prolog
The first line of each file is the prolog. For version 3 files, it must contain 2 fields: the version number, and the file type. The version number must be '3'. The file type is defined in table A.1.Version4 prolog formats are described in the documentation for each file type individually.

Table A.1

*    = ASCII file
**  = binary file
*** = mixed ASCII/binary

Minor rev
The second line of each file should be the minor revision number. At present, minor revision numbers are either '1', '2' or '3' depending on the file type.

Header
The header field depends on the file type, and is described separately in the section for that file type.

Data
The data field depends on the file type, and is described separately in the section for that file type.

Format Conventions
In this section of the documentation, string formats are indicated by using the C language standard i/o formatting convention, e.g., '%f' should be replaced by a floating point decimal number. In this documentation, all such formatting strings have a lower case identifying letter. Unfortunately, the EMSE file interpreter uses the '%' character to denote optional lines, and these are shown in the documentation with a capital letter identifier. For example, '%N' is used to indicate that the immediately following string represents a sensor name.