[itsallaboutthecode]

I have a friend who was going to use a pre-made system to pull data from an NVH tester... he wants to know how many and what types of file can LabVIEW read?? He wants to do an analysis and present the data in labview but the data will already be built into some type of file... if we can specify, which is the best to work with? If this software has its own type of data/file... is there a way to use labview to extract it anyway?

I am new to LabVIEW so I'm not too sure.

[Ton Plomp]

Try to get the specification of the file, look for words like 'float', 'unsigned', 'struct'.

Try to match a LabVIEW cluster, then use 'read from file' and the cluster as described. You might need to tweak the endianess of the read function.

If this fails (and it might) it's worthy to build a parser, but without a description and a demo file it's quite hard for us to help you.

Ton

[hooovahh]

I think the answer you are looking for is CSV or the like. Reading a tab delimited or comma delimited file is a native feature and can be done very quickly. There are some xml parsers that have been written, TDMS of course, and I think think that the file format for .DOC and .XLS are now documented, so theoretically a parser could be written (or may already exist in a DLL) for that. Pretty much the answer is any file type can be read in LabVIEW if you know how to parse it, and what structure it is in.