Last update: Wed Mar 25 11:48:03 MDT 2009

Generic CSV Data Packet Definition

• String will be prefaced with a unique word or key as the magic-cookie to identify this stream (e.g. "NOAA_SP2").
  
• The date-time (UTC) field will use any of the iso-8601 calendar date, any of the following iso-8601 forms is acceptable:

      yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss
      yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.ddd
      yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss -0600
      yyyymmddThhmmss

• The optional .ddd is to specify milliseconds and is acceptable on any of the forms above, even though only shown on one.
• Omitted time-zone shall be interpreted as UTC. This deviates from the iso-8601 specification which specifies no time zone information to be interpreted as local time.
• Values will be comma separated. This will allow for little loss of bandwidth for missing values.
• Data values other than date will be in any format acceptable to the ANSI C string-to-double function strtod(3).
• Recommend to implemetors to use appropriate significant figures.
• inf and nan are acceptable.
• Fields not supplied or available will be left empty (e.g. '...,4.523,,48.234,...').
  
• Optionally can be terminated by \r\n (carriage return, newline).

Example Format

Example String