Developer notes

Other file formats

Natively, MTUQ supports only SAC file format. Other formats can be added using an ObsPy-like plug-in system.

To add support for a new file format

• Create a module, i.e. mtuq/io/readers/newformat.py

• In the module, implement a reader, i.e. _read_newformat

• Register the reader by adding to project.entry-points in pyproject.toml

The new reader can then be invoked as mtuq.read(filename, format='newformat').

To get a sense how it works, see the MTUQ implementation for SAC or the ObsPy implementation for other file formats.

Further considerations

To maintain flexibility, it will be important that

• mtuq.read handles all file format-dependent metadata parsing

• metadata are stored in a common ObsPy-based internal structure that works the same regardless of the original file format

• data processing, misfit evaluation and other functions work the same regardless of the original file format