Overview

Sooner, not later, you're going to be saving data in disk files for future analysis. Perhaps the files will be read by LabVIEW or another application on your computer or on another machine of different manufacture. In any case, that data is (hopefully) important to someone, so you need to study the techniques available in LabVIEW for getting the data on disk reliably and without too much grief.

Before you start shoveling data into files, make sure that you understand the requirements of the application(s) that will be reading your files. Every application has preferred formats that are described in the appropriate manuals. If all else fails, it's usually a safe bet to write out numbers as ASCII text files, but even that simple format can cause problems at import time things including strange header information, incorrect combinations of carriage returns and/or line feeds, unequal column lengths, too many columns, or wrong numeric formats. Binary files are even worse, requiring tight specifications for both the writer and the reader. They are much faster to write or read and more compact than text files though, so learn to handle them as well. This chapter includes discussions of some common formats and techniques that you can use to handle them.

Study and understand your computer's file system. The online LabVIEW help discusses some important details such as path names and file reference numbers (refnums). If things really get gritty, you can also refer to the operating system reference manuals, or...