File formats

All GROOPS files are written either in XML, binary, or ASCII format depending on the filename extension.

With an additional extension of '.gz' files are directly compressed and uncompressed. It is also possible to directly uncompress and read (but not write) Unix compress'd files ('.Z').

Comments are allowed in ASCII files and all the text starting from the character '#' to the end of the line is ignored.

The program FileConvert can be used to convert between the different formats. This program is also useful to get some general information of files in binary format.

The following special file types are used in GROOPS: