Text File Format

Most files in the firemodels repositories are text files adhering to unix/linux formatting conventions; that is, they don't have line feed, LF, or carriage return/line feed, CRLF, characters embedded at the end of each line.

The files in the repository make use of unicode UTF-8 encoding, but most, especially source code, by and large stick to the 256 ASCII character set. Use special characters only when absolutely necessary. For example, Matlab supports the UTF-16 character set, and so many of the Matlab plotting scripts and input files contain UTF-8 characters like the degree symbol, Greek letters, and so on. We encourage end users to avoid using special characters in FDS input files because we worry how these characters are interpreted by the Fortran compiler.

Most modern text editors support UTF-8 encoding. However, the default for the editor vim used within the unix/linux operating system is not always UTF-8. You can see what your default encoding is by typing

:set

when vi editing a file. To change the default behavior, add

set encoding=utf-8

to your .vimrc file. If you use PuTTY to remotely access a unix/linux computer, when setting up a session, go to Category: Window > Translation and change the character set to UTF-8 and make sure that the line drawing characters use Unicode as well.

Here are some useful unicode characters:

x² is made by typing x and then ALT+0178

x³ is made by typing x and then ALT+0179

°C is made by typing ALT+0176 and then C