File Naming Convention

File names must have the following format: 

STATIONID_STARTDATETIME_FILEID.EXT
where:
Component Format Description
STATIONID ASCII text, no spaces and no underscore. You may use a hyphen. The station identifier. The format leaves the meaning of the station ID open to users of the data.
  • ASCII alphanumeric text (0-9, A-Z, a-z)
  • No white space such as spaces or tabs
  • No underscores (you may use hyphens)
  • No commas, semicolons, colons, plus signs, etc
  • Case is normally ignored
STARTDATETIME yyyyMMddHHmm where 'HH' is a value between 00 and 23 The start of the period of counting covered by this file.
FILEID Integer: zero or more. If not used, put 0 Used to distinguish between several files produced at the same station for the same time period but all having different direction/lanes codes.
EXT 'txt' or 'zip'
  • 'txt' identifies the file as plain ASCII text. Each line ends with the Windows line ending: carriage return and line feed ("\r\n").
  • 'zip' identifies the file as compressed. The zip file must contain a single file with 'txt' extension

Typical File Name

This shows a file from station 'T0261' containing data starting at midnight on July 11, 2016

T0261_201607110000_0.txt

Multiple Files for Same Station and Date

This shows two files from the same station '123-0432' starting at the same time. This is common when there are two machines counting different directions of a highway

123-0432_201609190000_1.txt
123-0432_201609190000_2.txt