Users’ Manual
EDI-53 Series Digital Indicator
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beings.
On the other hand if you would like to import this data in any other commercially available spread sheet
program (e.g. Microsoft Excel) or database program (e.g. Microsoft Access) for further processing you
should choose the ‘SEND’ key. When you press the ‘SEND’ key the data transferred is formatted in
comma delimited ASCII text format. Most commercially available spread sheet, data base and many
other analytical programs have an option for importing comma delimited ASCII text files.
If you care to look at the transferred comma delimited ASCII text file on the screen you will find that the
data looks somewhat like the example shown below. This example is a typical 'logged data' file
downloaded from the indicator.
"CHNO","DATE","TIME","VALUE"
0,"2000/01/07","21:56",0.4
0,"2000/01/07","21:58",38.9
1,"2000/01/07","22:14",39.6
1,"2000/01/07","22:20",-0.3
2,"2000/01/07","22:23",-0.0
2,"2000/01/07","22:28",0.0
3,"2000/01/07","22:45",119.8
3,"2000/01/07","22:49",10.4
4,"2000/01/07","22:57",120.3
4,"2000/01/07","22:58",48.7
The first line lists the name of the data fields, so that the program in which this data is imported can make
out the sequence of fields in the following data records. The rest of the lines are data records with the
data of each field separated by a comma delimiter. The comma delimited files can contain two types of
data in a record.
Numeric data — a pure number consisting of digits 0 to 9, plus or minus sign and one decimal point
Character data — usually called as a character string. It consists of a string of alphabets, digits 0 to 9,
and some printable symbols. Character strings are invariably enclosed in double quotes.
The coding method used by the indicator in sending each character of the data file to the computer is in
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) format hence it is called an ASCII text file.
The one peculiarity you will notice in the records is the date and time data are treated as character
strings and not as numbers. This is because of the presence of the characters “/” and “:” in these data.
The other thing you will notice is that in the date field the ‘year’ comes first, followed by the ‘month’ and
finally the ‘date’. This form of writing the date is generally known amongst software programmers as
ASCII date string. The advantage in writing the date in this form is that the date field can be easily used
for sorting the records either in ascending or descending order. Because the year is most important the
dates are first sorted on year, then on month and then on ‘day of month’.
