3.3. ASCII table

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Preamble

An ASCII table is interpreted line by line and has three parts

• head indicator
• file heading information
• data

Columns are separated by (multiple) whitespace characters, i.e., tab and space.

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Head indicator

The head indicator takes up the first line of the file

1: N   head[...]

where N is the number of lines that hold heading information (excluding itself, see example below).

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Head information

If N > 0 then the next N - 1 lines hold arbitrary information and line N + 1 specifies the names of all columns in the table.

2:   if you need to tell more about the file...

     ...use as many heading lines as you need.
N:   data columns are specified in the last header line, e.g. a three-dimensional scalar field:
N+1: 1_pos  2_pos  3_pos  field_value

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Data

All subsequent lines contain whitespace-separated data.

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Example

The following example shows a typical ASCII table resulting from the postResults script. This exemplary table has one line of arbitrary heading information in addition to the column labels.

2	header
$Id: postResults 722 2011-01-14 13:15:19Z MPIE\c.kords $
inc	elem	node	grain	1_ipinitialcoord	2_ipinitialcoord	3_ipinitialcoord	LogarithmicStrain.intensity	CauchyStress.intensity	phase	1_orientation	2_orientation	3_orientation	4_orientation
450	1.0	1.0	1.0	0.025	0.025	0.025	0.208811183652	142613044.256	1.0	-0.513934612274	-0.304725438356	0.438042849302	0.67166364193
450	1.0	9.0	1.0	0.075	0.025	0.025	0.226491407214	149663024.085	1.0	-0.50838971138	-0.305481612682	0.439483761787	0.67459243536
...