# EHdr – ESRI .hdr Labelled

Driver short name

EHdr

Driver built-in by default

This driver is built-in by default

GDAL supports reading and writing the ESRI .hdr labeling format, often referred to as ESRI BIL format. Eight, sixteen and thirty-two bit integer raster data types are supported as well as 32 bit floating point. Coordinate systems (from a .prj file), and georeferencing are supported. Unrecognized options in the .hdr file are ignored. To open a dataset select the file with the image file (often with the extension .bil). If present .clr color table files are read, but not written. If present, image.rep file will be read to extract the projection system of SpatioCarte Defense 1.0 raster products.

This driver does not always do well differentiating between floating point and integer data. The GDAL extension to the .hdr format to differentiate is to add a field named PIXELTYPE with values of either FLOAT, SIGNEDINT or UNSIGNEDINT. In combination with the NBITS field it is possible to described all variations of pixel types.

eg.

    ncols 1375
    nrows 649
    cellsize 0.050401
    xllcorner -130.128639
    yllcorner 20.166799
    nodata_value 9999.000000
    nbits 32
    pixeltype float
    byteorder msbfirst

This driver may be sufficient to read GTOPO30 data.

NOTE: Implemented as `gdal/frmts/raw/ehdrdataset.cpp`.

## Driver capabilities

Supports CreateCopy()

This driver supports the `GDALDriver::CreateCopy()` operation

Supports Create()

This driver supports the `GDALDriver::Create()` operation

Supports Georeferencing

This driver supports georeferencing

Supports VirtualIO

This driver supports virtual I/O operations (/vsimem/, etc.)

## See Also

- ESRI whitepaper: + Extendable Image Formats for ArcView GIS 3.1 and 3.2 (BIL, see p. 5)

- GTOPO30 - Global Topographic Data

- GTOPO30 Documentation

- SpatioCarte Defense 1.0 specification (in French)

- SRTMHGT Driver