I too am examining file formats. I have been evaluating HDF as well as other formats. My recommendations:
HDF: It appears that your data is rather simplistic and non-heirarchical. There is no reason to use HDF unless you need to store the heirarchy of your data. Binary: Since you have two flavors of data, you are going to need to define two storage sets with some kind of header indicating whether the particular set is unsigned or two's compliment. This would be a reasonable way to go (and the simplest). ASCII: This is probably a better route. You will need to convert the raw binary representation of the data into ascii and list the sets in columns, which is very easy. However, if you are concerned about loss of precision in the tranisition from machine representation to text, then this is not the way to go, and I would recommend binary (this is a very slight effect). One last consideration is data longevity. If you want to be able to rediscover your data in a couple years, it is going to be much more transparent if you use an ascii format. With HDF or binary you will find that you have an unintelligible mess of zeros and ones. I could offer more assistance if I understood your intent for the data. Hope this helps. Regards, Mike Gilbert -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
