Hi Christen,

Thanks for your email. Sorry it has taken a couple days to get back to you. I have been out of town.

The SEF standard has many problems. It was originally developed for the program "SMAPS", which was a fairly sophisticated DOS cave survey program. I always hated SEF, because the standard and definitions are ambiguous and there are so many different options, that it is almost impossible to deal with all the combinations. Different programs interpret the documentation in different ways. Even Doug Dotson, who developed the SEF format, implemented it in different ways in different versions of SMAPS.

The "flag" data in the SEF file comes from something the documentation calls a "Shot Type" which the documentation describes as a "SMAPS feature, 4 ASCII characters max". There is one of these for each shot. I think it was intended as a catch-all for anything that might be used to describe the shot.

In practice, at least for SMAPS, the data contains simple single letter commands that are identical to the Compass shot flags. However, SMAPS allowed the user to enter custom flags. Also, other programs may put different data in those flags; the standard is open ended.

When I implemented the Compass SEF importer, I wasn't sure what data would be in those flags. I could have filtered it, only allowing flags I recognized. The downside would be that data would be lost. Instead, I just copy the data "as-is" into the Compass flag. I figured that since the user would know the source of the data, he/she could figure out how to interpret the meaning of non-conforming flags and could change them as needed.

The bottom line is the "|#*|" probably came from the original data. I wouldn't know what it means without knowing something about the source of the data.

> I also notice that spacing is different between a SEF import

> and a DAT file produced from the survey editor. Why?

The Compass format has undergone many changes over the years as I have added new data fields and increased the size of the "Station Names." As these fields have changed, the number of spaces has changed to make the data more readable.

The SEF import tool was probably written at a time when the layout was slightly different. The "DAT" file format does not expect a fixed number of spaces between items. The spaces are only there for the benefit of the human reader.

Compass doesn't really care about the number of spaces in the file. Items can be separated by one space or as many as you want. Some of the first DAT files that I generated back in 1979 can still be read by the current version of Compass. I think in 1979, I only allowed five characters for station names and the software ran on a PDP-10 Main frame that was as big as a house.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Larry