Binary file of unknown formats

Question

Hello everybody,
I posted a message earlier today but unfortunately I missed to give more details about my problem. I am sorry about that. I am a new user of LabView so I still have many things to learn. What I am trying to do is use LabView (8.2) to read a file that was created by UVP Monitor, V3.0 (*.mfprof file).
This package saves fluid velocity information. There are 65 channels that form a velocity profile in a pipe. Also, there are 4096 velocity profiles, each velocity profile was captured at a time rate of 9 ms. I don’t know what is the format of these values.
At present, I obtain a text file from UVP Monitor, then process the data using FORTRAN and finally plot the results. I want to avoid this and read the UVP file, process, analyze and plot the data using only LabView. I want to read individual experimental parameters as well as the bulk of the data. In this way the user has different options to choose from before processing and plotting the results. I actually built a VI that processes and plots the text files and it runs great.
The problem I am facing now is that I want to read the UVP file but I have no information about the structure of it. I am assuming it is a binary file but that is all I can say about it.
The header and footer seem to be in text format, that is all I can read; however, the body of the file I am not yet able to read.
The information from the file is sent to the type cast function. Then I set a string indicator in the “Normal” option in Properties. I can read the header and footer but not the body of the file; for the body of the file all I can see is characters of the type
“C¾ Ü Qþ  X@ “. One of the other options, Password, seems to provide an output of just the characters that were originally written, but then again, I can not read the characters because it is only asterisks and I can not copy them onto a word processor either.
I have tried other options as well, such as Variant to flattened string and flattened string to variant, flatten to string and unflatten from string. Unfortunately none of them worked.
I am attaching the VI I wrote and a sample UVP file , I would appreciate if someone could explain to me how to deal with  complex binary files in LabView and share an example with me if possible.
Regards,
Roberto
Attachments:
BINARY Read UVP file.vi ‏45 KB
Test UVP file.zip ‏693 KB

Answer 1

OK, here's a quick draft how you could do it in LabVIEW. Modify as needed, e.g. slice out the interesting columns, etc.
The header has some binary data that may, or may not, mean something useful.
See if the data "looks" about right.
Message Edited by altenbach on 04-26-2007 08:13 PM
Message Edited by altenbach on 04-26-2007 08:15 PM
LabVIEW Champion . Do more with less code and in less time .
Attachments:
BinaryRead.png ‏10 KB
BINARY Read UVP file2.vi ‏46 KB