Summary of Rules and Record Types

General Rules

General formatting rules include:

1. A GEOCOUNTS Key, if provided, must be valid.
2. The Header section ends when the first Body record is encountered. After that, no other header records can occur. (There is no explicit "start of header" or "start of body" information.)
3. Each record uses exactly one line which is terminated by the end of line marker ("\r\n").
4. Text entered by a user must have commas escaped. E.g. "A, B" must become "A\, B"
5. Numeric values use a decimal point, not a comma, if they represent floating point values.
6. US Customary feet lengths are expressed as decimal values, not feet and inches; E.g. 6.1 means 6 and 1 tenth feet.
7. Except for the SC, SL and SE records, all other header record types appear at most once.
8. Blank lines are not allowed.
9. Unless specified by the SZ record, dates and times are related to the local time where the count was taken.
10. Body records may appear in any order. Time sequence order is encouraged for readability but is not required.
11. Records must not end with white space characters.

Header Records

TD 60

Header records must all appear prior to any body record: observation (V), tally (T) or monitoring event (M). Only the channel definition (SC) and station label (SL) and equipment label (SE) header records may appear more than once in a file.

Body Records