Binary LineList Format

When a line list is produced with PrintLevel = Binary the resulting binary format is designed to be quick to read by external programs. (See the information about the Command Line Version for a common way to do this) It has the same content as the other linelist formats, and consists of a sequence of lines/records:

The first line contains the program version as a string and as an integer.
The second line has a string for each field, containing the field name
A record for each transition
The final line has the total intensity of all the lines, and the number of lines.

The line/record is a simple sequence of fields, with each field headed by a byte identifying the type:

Header Byte	Field Contents
< 200	String field; header byte gives length. A one character string with a single character 10 (new line character) implies end of line/record.
200+sizeof(int) (Normally 204)	Integer. Note that quantum numbers are represented as integers with twice the true value.
200+sizeof(double) (Normally 224)	Floating point value

The integer and floating point values are in the format naive to the platform, so the binary files are not necessarily transportable between machines.

A simple C program that dumps the binary file as text is shown below:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#ifdef _Windows
#include <io.h>
#else
#include <unistd.h>
#define O_BINARY 0
#endif
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(int argc, char*argv[])
{
  int fd = open(argv[1],O_RDONLY | O_BINARY);      /* Open file */
  struct stat sbuf;
  unsigned char *buffer, *p;
  fstat(fd,&sbuf);                      /* Find it's size */
  buffer = malloc(sbuf.st_size);
  read(fd, buffer, sbuf.st_size);       /* Read it into memory */
  p = buffer;
  while ( p < buffer + sbuf.st_size ) { /* Loop over entries */
    if ( (*p > 0) && (*p < 200) ) {  /* Is it a string? */
      if ( (*p == 1) && (p[1] == 10) )
        printf("\n");               /* End of line marker */
      else {
        fwrite(p+1, 1, *p, stdout); /* Normal string */
        printf(" ");
      }
      p += *p + 1; /* Skip string */
    } else if ( *p < 216 ) {
      printf("%d ",*(int *)(p+1)); /* Integer */
      p += 1 + sizeof(int);
    } else if ( *p < 232 ) {
      printf("%g ",*(double *)(p+1)); /* Floating point value */
      p += 1 + sizeof(double);
    } else {
      printf("\nUnknown Field:%d\n",*p);
      return 1;
    }
  }
  return 0; 
}