General Table Requirements

OLAF Requirements for General Tables

• Data must be in standard ASCII (with no ASCII extension characters).
• Filenames are limited to 30 characters including the extension, which must be .tab. Filenames cannot be mixed-case. (OLAF will convert to lower case.)
• No Tab characters are allowed.
• Each line must be the same number of bytes long, and each column within the line must have the same width (in bytes) for each row. Spaces should be used to pad the columns and rows to this requirement.
• Decimal numbers must be aligned on the decimal point.
• Integers must be right-aligned.
• Character fields must be left-aligned.
• No blank lines may exist in the file.
• Columns may not have blank entries. Entries for which there is no data are to be filled with a "null value" such as - for character fields, 0 for integer fields, or -999.99999 (chosen to match the format of the field) for real fields. Choose a null value which is outside the range of valid values for the field.
• If the columns are uniformly delimited by single spaces, OLAF can detect the columns and fill in the start bytes of the columns. If the columns are delimited by more than a single space or varying numbers of spaces, you will be required to enter the start byte of each column.