Matthew,
Good. So
- line sequential = records followed by "end of line delimiter" =
LF, CRLF, CR depending on the platform. No extra padding at end.
- fixed length = records stacked one after another, no record
header, no delimiter.
- variable - 128 bytes of slop (including date/time stamps by the
look) followed by the records. The record format looks like this
x'40' byte(length) data
The data is padded to make the record length a multiple of 4
bytes. The padding seems to vary, sometimes spaces, sometimes
x'00'.
It would be useful to try variable length non line sequential
with record length
> 127
> 256
>32k
>64k
Without the doc of the 128 bytes we cannot create a file that MF
will read (other than by just copying one of their headers byte
for byte), though we can read their files. I will have a look for
conversion routines.
Maybe we should just use s 4 byte word as the record header (at
least as one option).
Tim Josling