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- Leading spaces and tab characters are ignored.
- verbs and directives keyword=value have to be terminated with a comma, except the last one, which MARS considers as the end of a request.
- Directives may be in upper or lower case or a mixture of both; MARS converts everything except file names to upper case.
- Characters * ! and # can be used to comment until end-of-line.
- Values may be predefined names, numeric values or user-supplied character strings such as file names.
- Abbreviations may be used for verbs, keywords and values, provided enough letters are given to uniquely identify what is meant.
- MARS has acronyms for the names of different parameters which can be specified by users.
- Keywords may be assigned a single value, a list of values or a range of values. A list is indicated by the separator / ; a range is indicated by using the keywords to as well as / and by. Examples of different formats for values are given in the table below.
Examples of MARS keyword assignments Format Example single value param = temperature/SSRD list of values step = 12/24/48 range of values date = 19990104/to/19990110/by/2
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