Data Formats

Habitat supports a number of data formats in the import and export of data. Chief of these is the Fat Headed Array (FHA), which a variation on Comma Separated Values (CSV).

FHA uses a tab separator between columns and uses optional quotes (“) on values when needing to embed tabs. The header line is expanded to include additional sets of information for each column, known as info rows, which are printed over several lines below the single row header. An example is shown below

tom		dick		harry
Thomas		Richard		Harold	first_name
Smith		Brown		Bloggs	last_name
------		-------		------
1		2		3
4		5		6
7		8		9

The single row of column names and the zero or more info rows, form an extended header block that is terminated by two or more dashes (--) on a single line. In the example above, the dashes have been extended to form a ruler line of the width of each column, similar to the convention of a SQL table display. Following the ruler is the tabulated array of values, which may be any sequence of characters excluding tab (\t) and the double quote (“). In summary, The fat headed array must have the same number of columns through out each row, but will be one more for the second and successive headers rows (the info rows).

Optionally, other formats can be used: CSV for comma (,) separated values, PSV for pipe (|) separated values, TSV for tab separated values and SSV for space ( ) separated values. None of these formats contain a fat header, which contain info rows and a header delimiter.