MTS Series 793 Application - Manual (Page 136)

MTS MultiPurpose TestWare®
About Specimen.dat Files
Working with MPT Specimens 136
How to format the data
in the MPT specimen
data file
You can configure the MPT application to format the data written to the
Specimen.dat file in one of three ways:
• Plain—test data is space-delimited. This option provides the most useful
output when viewing the test data in an application such as Notepad or
Microsoft Word.
• Lotus—test data is comma-delimited, with text strings enclosed in
quotation marks (this is sometimes referred to as the CSV format). This
option formats the data for use with Lotus 1-2-3.
• Excel—test data is tab-delimited. This option formats the data for use with
Microsoft Excel.
You specify the data file format on the Specimen tab of the MPT Options
Editor.
If you plan to use the Excel File Converter, the data must be tab-or comma-
delimited.
How to parse the MPT
specimen data file
The first line of the data file is a text string that includes information such as the
decimal separator, column separator, time formats, date formats, and so forth.
This header may be used if you plan to parse the data file with a custom
application.
A typical header looks like this:
MTS793|MPT|ENU|1|0|.|/|:|1|0|0|A
The format of this header line is as follows:
MTS793|progName|sLanguage|version|iDelim|sDecimal|sDate|sTime|iCountry|iDate|iTime|sCode
Where:
progName=MPT or BTW
sLanguage= Natural language (standard three-character abbreviation)
version=Version of this format string
iDelim=Data delimiter: 0 for space (plain), 1 for comma (Lotus), 2 for tab (Excel)
sDecimal=International decimal separator
sDate=International date separator
sTime=International time separator
iCountry=International country value
iDate=International date format
iTime=International time format
sCode=Character Set Code: A for ANSI, O for OEM (currently always A)