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Update 2016-09-26-bitwise_images.md #12

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Expand Up @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ slack_channel: tools
image:
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Despite the labels / metadata often being somewhat complicated to parse, as discussed in [a previous post by Trent Hare](http://openplanetary.co/blog/tools/pds-interoperable-format.html), the PDS image format is actually pretty simple at its core. This is by design: as an "archival" image format, it needs to be more or less self-describing so that some future programmer in ten or fifty years can figure out how to read the file by inspection alone--that is, just by looking at the file contents--with perhaps a small assist from some plaintext documentation. (This is a "fun" exercise; if you're into such things, you should stop reading now and go do it.) This means that if you don't have a PDS data reader available in your language of choice--because you are super hip and use [new](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)) or [unusual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)) languages--then you should be able to hack one together pretty quickly.
Despite the labels / metadata often being somewhat complicated to parse, as discussed in [a previous post by Trent Hare](https://openplanetary.github.io/blog/tools/pds-interoperable-format.html), the PDS image format is actually pretty simple at its core. This is by design: as an "archival" image format, it needs to be more or less self-describing so that some future programmer in ten or fifty years can figure out how to read the file by inspection alone--that is, just by looking at the file contents--with perhaps a small assist from some plaintext documentation. (This is a "fun" exercise; if you're into such things, you should stop reading now and go do it.) This means that if you don't have a PDS data reader available in your language of choice--because you are super hip and use [new](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)) or [unusual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)) languages--then you should be able to hack one together pretty quickly.

Such files are generally formatted thusly:
* There is a header that contains metadata in some plaintext (ASCII) markup format. Because it's in plaintext, you can read it by just opening the file in a text editor (or, e.g., by using the command line `less` or `more` tools).
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