7. Importing and Exporting SCIRun Data

This chapter describes the format of text-based data files and the use of SCIRun's reader and writer modules to import/export SCIRun data objects from/to text files.

SCIRun's reader and writer modules support two classes of data formats: SCIRun's persistent format and text-based formats. This chapter discusses text-based formats.

In general, it is best to save data in SCIRun's persistent format. SCIRun's persistent format loads faster, supports better numerical precision, and is usually smaller than its text-based counterpart. SCIRun's persistent data files are portable between machine architectures. Text-based data are used primarily to import data generated by other software into SCIRun and to export SCIRun generated data to other software.

Using Readers and Using Writers discuss the use of SCIRun's reader and writer modules to read and write text-based data. Text-based File Formats describes the format of text-based data files.