Next: Portable File Structure, Up: Portable File Format [Contents][Index]
Portable files are arranged as a series of lines of 80 characters each. Each line is terminated by a carriage-return, line-feed sequence (“new-lines”). New-lines are only used to avoid line length limits imposed by some OSes; they are not meaningful.
Most lines in portable files are exactly 80 characters long. The only exception is a line that ends in one or more spaces, in which the spaces may optionally be omitted. Thus, a portable file reader must act as though a line shorter than 80 characters is padded to that length with spaces.
The file must be terminated with a ‘Z’ character. In addition, if the final line in the file does not have exactly 80 characters, then it is padded on the right with ‘Z’ characters. (The file contents may be in any character set; the file contains a description of its own character set, as explained in the next section. Therefore, the ‘Z’ character is not necessarily an ASCII ‘Z’.)
For the rest of the description of the portable file format, new-lines and the trailing ‘Z’s will be ignored, as if they did not exist, because they are not an important part of understanding the file contents.