/sane

Simple Array of Numbers Encoding

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" LicenseBSD-3-Clause

sane - Simple Array of Numbers Encoding

An array encoded in the sane format consists of

  1. The ASCII-encoded byte sequence SANE (0x53 0x41 0x4E 0x45)
  2. A little-endian uint32 encoding the length of the shape
  3. A little-endian1 shape as a sequence of little-endian uint64 sizes for each dimension
  4. A uint8 specifying the data type
  5. A little-endian uint64 encoding the byte length of the data of the array
  6. A sequence of the numbers as specified by the data-type in row-major order (C-order)

Data Types

Supported data types are

  • 0: float32
  • 1: int32 (signed)
  • 2: uint32 (unsigned)
  • 3: float64
  • 4: int64 (signed)
  • 5: uint64 (unsigned)
  • 6: int8 (signed)
  • 7: uint8 (unsigned)
  • 8-255: reserved

All supported data types are stored in little-endian byte order.

Footnotes

  1. A little-endian shape has the fastest-changing dimension first. For the C-expressions A[i][j], the size of the dimension corresponding to j precedes the size of the dimension corresponding to i. ↩