[GRASS5] the floating raster file format

[Andrea Antonello]

Hy folks,
after a good bottle of Montpulciano D'abruzzo and seven hours (9pm Saturday to 
4am Sunday) in the pre-eastern night, with the help of my good friend "el 
Pitero", the amazing Khexedit, the Grass sources and the r.compress command, 
we finally have the binary raster format of floating point maps in Grass. 
I'ld like to share that, since apart of the bottle of good wine it was a 
heavy experience and none should repeat it:). I hope somebody can find 
usefull what follows and give me hints or make me notice possible errors.

Alright, let's get started:
My explanation example is a 3x3 floating point file. 
At the begin of the file we have 4 bytes, These are the same for compressed, 
uncompressed, integer or floating, so I left them aside for now. After these 
4 bytes, other three pairs of 4 bytes follow, which contain the address of 
each row of data in the file (this also tells us, that there is a limit in 
the dimension of raster files, even if huge). After these bytes the rows of 
data start. Each row can be simply passed through a zlib decompressor. After 
that action we have the row of data in uncompressed format. The only thing 
left to do is to get out of that stream the right dataformat. That's all, 
rather simple if you know how to do it :)

With the help of a small example:

The file is the following 3x3 floating point matrix:
10.000 20.000 30.000
20.000 40.000 50.000
30.000 50.000 60.000

Here is the binary and decimal version:
THE HEADER PART:
binary:    00000100 00000000 00000000 00000000 
decimal: 4              0                0               0                

00010001 00000000 00000000 00000000 
17             0               0               0        

00100100 00000000 00000000 00000000 
36             0               0               0        

00110111 00000000 00000000 00000000 
55            0               0               0        

01001010 00110001 
74            49

COMMENTS:
4 could be the number of bytes used to define the address of each row, but I 
would not bet about that.
17 is the adress in bytes after which the first row of data starts,
36 is the same for the second row and 55 for the third. 74 is the end of file.
I noticed the last byte only now, I will try to understand it later.

After that, the rows of data come and since we know the offset between the 
rows, we know exactly how many bytes to send through the zlib decompressor.


Any comment or hint is very appreciated.
Hope this was kind of clear...
Cheers,
Andrea



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University of Trento
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Via Mesiano, 77 - Trento (ITALY)

Andrea Antonello
tel:  +393288497722
fax:  +390461882672
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