CalTech's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
use a text-based format for storage of tabular data,
defined at
http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/applications/DDGEN/Doc/ipac_tbl.html.
Tables can store column name, type, units and null values, as well
as table parameters. They typically have a filename extension
".tbl" and are used for Spitzer data amongst other
things. An example looks like this:
\title='Animals'
\ This is a table with some animals in it.
| RECNO | SPECIES | NAME | LEGS | HEIGHT |
| char | char | char | int | double |
| | | | | m |
| | | null | | |
1 pig Pigling Bland 4 0.8
2 cow Daisy 4 2
3 goldfish Dobbin 0 0.05
4 ant null 6 0.001