It is usually possible to input a file written by some other program into DX. The procedure is simply to create a file which describes the contents of the data file to DX. This description file is called a ‘header file’ and is simply a text file created with an editor.
As an example this recipe shows how to input a formatted text file containing particle (or catalogue) data. The positions of the particles trace out a three-dimensional cone. The data are represented as a single DX field (see Section 17). For simplicity the file contains only this single field. However, it is possible to have particle datasets containing several fields, similar to the gridded data in Section 5. The program to generate the data is listed in Figure 9.
.general
’. Thus the present example is called ‘particle.general
’.
interleaving=field
’ specifies this sort of interleaving.
A full description of all the possible keywords is given in Section 4.3 Header File Syntax: Keyword Statements of the IBM QuickStart Guide[1].
See the notes for variations of Importing Gridded Data, Section 5, above.