[gdal-dev] VRT raster for reading formatted files?

[Mike Toews]

Hi all,

I've been using the VRTRawRasterBand feature of the VRT format to read
unformatted (so-called "BINARY") 2D grid data, which has been very
successful to adapt to obscure formats.

However, I would like to know if there is a similar feature of the VRT
format to read formatted values (so-called "ASCII") from a
SourceFilename.

There are already a few GDAL drivers that do this already,
specifically AAIGrid / GRASSASCIIGrid and GSAG. Possibly others. But
it would be great to see if there is a generic approach with VRT.

An example of a SourceFilename is at:
https://github.com/mwtoews/MODFLOW-2005/blob/release/test-run/etsdrt.bas

With this example there are two formatted 2D arrays (integer and
float), which of course start on different line numbers (4 and 17).
Other parts of this file have a specific format, and are out of scope.
Similar to VRTRawRasterBand, all of other metadata, including grid
size, are provided elsewhere.

Cheers,
-Mike