PulsarHunter Candidate (XML Format).
PHCX files store data for search candidates. They can contain multiple sections and plots in an extensible XML format. They are typically produced by pulsarhunter (ph-best and ph-tune), and contain information from the FFT search and the time domain optimisation.
PHXC files are normally created in a gziped form and have the extension .phcx.gz
The PHCX format is an XML based data type. There are two main blocks, <head> and <body>.
<head> contains the header information, such as the telescope, coordinate, etc…
<body> contains one or more <section> elements.
Each <section> represents a set of plots and parameters in the search. E.g. <section name=‘FFT’> are the parameters from seek/best
Inside section are <bestValues>, which contain best period etc, and a series of elements for plots.
The data for plots is encoded in 2-digit hexadecimal (similar to how EPN files are formatted). In fact, the format that the data was written with is written in the tag (e.g. format=‘02X’ for the 2-digit hex). These are the C-style printf formats, without the % sign on the front. There is a scaling factor for the Hex, specified by the max= and min= elements