The following task concerns data that came from a pollution monitoring station with twenty-four instruments monitoring twenty-four aspects of pollution in the air. Periodically a record is added to the file, each record being a line of 49 fields separated by white-space, which can be one or more space or tab characters.
i.e. a datestamp followed by twenty-four repetitions of a floating-point instrument value and that instrument's associated integer flag. Flag values are >= 1 if the instrument is working and < 1 if there is some problem with it, in which case that instrument's value should be ignored.
A sample from the full data file [http://rosettacode.org/resources/readings.zip readings.txt], which is also used in the [[Text processing/1]] task, follows:
Data is no longer available at that link. Zipped mirror available [https://github.com/thundergnat/rc/blob/master/resouces/readings.zip here]
