Reserved Words, Header, and Comments

The table below shows which words are reserved and must not be used.

ARRAY DWORD UCHAR
BINARY FLOAT ULONGLONG
BINARY_RESOURCE SDWORD UNICODE
CHAR STRING WORD
CSTRING SWORD
DOUBLE TEMPLATE

The variable-length header is compulsory and must be at the beginning of the data stream. The header contains the following data.

Type Required Size (in bytes) Value Description
Magic Number x 4 xof
Version Number x 2 03 Major version 3
03 Minor version 3
Format Type x 4 txt Text File
bin Binary file
tzip MSZip compressed text file
bzip MSZip compressed binary file
Float Size x 0064 64-bit floats
x "0032" 32-bit floats

The values in the table are delimited by quotes to call attention to the number of characters in each value. Those with 4 bytes contain four characters, those with 2 bytes contain two characters.

Comments are applicable only in text files. Comments can occur anywhere in the data stream. A comment begins with either C++ style double-slashes (//), or a pound sign (#). The comment runs to the next new line. The following example shows valid comments.

#  This is a comment.
// This is another comment.