# Formatting Data for Transportability

You can achieve the highest transportability of your data by formatting it as 8-bit character data. Use a standard character set, such as the ASCII standard, for encoding your character data. Although this practice is less efficient than using binary data, it will save you from shuffling and converting your data.

If you are transporting your data by means of a record-structured medium, it is best to use the Fortran sequential files. See Record Types in the reference guide for more information.

Remember also that some systems use a carriage return/linefeed pair as an end-of-record indicator, while other systems use linefeed only. There might be system-dependent values embedded within your data that complicate its transport.

Implementing a strictly portable solution requires a careful effort. Maximizing portability may also mean making compromises to the efficiency and functionality of your solution. If portability is not your highest priority, you can use some of the techniques that appear in later sections to ease your task of customizing a solution.

Parent topic: Data Portability

## See Also

Methods of Specifying the Data Format
Porting Nonnative Data
Record Types
Supported Native and Nonnative Numeric Formats