Support of ipf files with one row header (like default csv files)

[jc-hunink]

iMOD 5 supports also ipf files with al header information in one row, like normal csv files. The support of this ipf/csv files for point information can make the use of the tool much easier.

[erikgeo]

I was coincidentally discussing this with Joeri yesterday.

Perhaps the parquet or feather file format could be used as a more efficient way to store ipf data? Both are column-based formats, as opposed to csv, which is row-based. I don't know how practical it is to use these formats over traditional ipf's or csv's to store, read and write borehole/well/cpt data, but there are some potential benefits:

• Fast reading and writing, especially feather
• Much smaller file sizes compared to csv (and to IPF, I suppose), especially parquet
• Both are integrated in Pandas (pandas.read_parquet/feather, pandas.write_parquet/feather functions available)
• You can read specific columns to further speed up reading time (note pandas.read_csv with the usecols argument isn't actually faster as it still has to read every column due to the way the data is stored in memory (row-by-row in sequence), whereas parquet and feather have their columns in sequence in memory)

I can imagine there are some drawbacks when trying to use these formats, some of which I'm probably not aware of.

https://databricks.com/glossary/what-is-parquet
https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/feather.html