FORTRAN Reference Manual

Statements

FORTRAN Reference Manual—528615-001

7-39

FORMAT Statement

The FORMAT statement is used together with formatted I/O statements to write

formatted output or read formatted input.

format-list

is a list of items, separated by field separators (, /):

repeat

is a nonzero, unsigned, integer constant that specifies the number of

successive appearances of ed or format-list.

is a repeatable edit descriptor.

ned

is a nonrepeatable edit descriptor.

Format Control

Formatted data transfer using a format specification initiates format control. Format

control depends upon the correspondence between an edit descriptor contained in a

format specification and an item in the I/O list of a WRITE, READ, or PRINT statement.

For every I/O list item there must be a repeatable edit descriptor in the format

specification, except that for every complex item, there must be two repeatable edit

descriptors: one for the real part and one for the imaginary part.

You can use an empty format specification of the form ( ) if you specify no list items. In

this case, FORTRAN skips one input record or writes one output record containing no

characters.

A format specification is interpreted from left to right. FORTRAN processes a format

specification containing a repeat specification as a list containing a repeat number of

the format specification. For example, FORTRAN interprets the following specification:

FORMAT (2I6, 2F6.2, 2(I5, E3.1))

FORMAT ( [ format-list ] )

repeat[]ed

ned

repeat[]format list–()

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