File formats

File content determination via file name extensions

lmt automatically detects the format of input files by the filename extension. Supported extensions are

• ".csv" for ordinary comma separated values ascii text files
• ".blkcsv" for comma separated value ascii text files in block format
• ".bin" for binary files in block format
• ".coocsv" csv-format for storing sparse matrices in coordinate format.

Note that this mechanism does not apply to files containing genotypes.

".csv" files

".csv" files may contain several commented lines at the top only where the comment character is "#".

The type of the file content is determined by its prospective use, that is

• the data file is supposed to contain only real/float numbers which are transferred to integer if required,
• a file containing an ordinary pedigree is supposed to contain only integer numbers,
• a file containing a missing value indicator matrix is supposed to contain only character strings.