An Example of the ITEM_TYPE_LIST Category

The following example section illustrates the data types that are defined within this DDL. The DDL uses a number of character data types which have subtly different definitions. For instance, the data type identified as code defines a single word character string; char extends the code type with the addition of a white space character; and text extends the char type with the addition of a new line character. Two special character data types name and idname are used to define the full STAR data name and the STAR name components, respectively. The data type any is used to match any potential data type. This type is used for data items that may hold a variety of data types. The data type int is defined as one of more decimal digits, and the yyyy-mm-dd type defines a date string.

#
#              DATA TYPE CONVERSION TABLE
#              -------------------------- 
#
     loop_
    _item_type_list.code
    _item_type_list.primitive_code
    _item_type_list.detail
    _item_type_list.construct
     code    char      'A single word'
      '[^\t\n "]*'
     char    char      'A single line of text'
      '[^\n]*'
     text    char      'Text which may span lines'
      '.*'
     int     numb      'Unsigned integer data'
      '[0-9]+'
     name    uchar     'A data item name (restrictive type)'
      '_[_A-Za-z0-9]+[.][][_A-Za-z0-9%/-]+'
aliasname    uchar     'A DDL 1.4 data item name (less restrictive type)'
      '_[^\t\n "]+'
     idname  uchar     'A data item name component or identifier'
      '[_A-Za-z0-9]+'
     any     char      'Any data type'
      '.*'
     yyyy-mm-dd char   'A date format'
      '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9]?[0-9]-[0-9][0-9]'