If the input file is record-oriented , the user may choose to treat it as fixed format or as delimited . ParseRat's initial assumption will recognise this and separate the input fields accordingly. An example would be sheets of labels or of catalogue entries. Emails, web pages and XML files are examples of tag-oriented data. In the case of XML files, ParseRat will make an automatic initial selection of tags which may be edited by the user if the ones chosen are not appropriate.
Many files consist of binary data , with no delimiters.
Frequently such files consist of an initial header block, usually giving details of the structure of the remainder of the file. These records may consist of text-only material or binary numbers or a combination of both. You may then export its data in a manner similar to that for fixed format files. The data in the input fields may be combined in various sequences, further split into components or processed in other ways . In the example at the left, the predefined combination process assembles fields from the input data in three different ways.