In the world of spacecraft operations, the key medium for interfaces and data flow involves the transfer of files. The contents of these files can have a multitude of different types based on the information that needs to be transferred, the origins and age of the interface, the software being used and the intended purpose. This leads to a wide variety of file formats just within a single mission. The diversity multiplies when expanding the view to the level of an agency or company and then further to inter-agency level, especially where legacy and modern software and interfaces need to co-exist. With all of the diversity comes an equally diverse range of parsers, some hard-coded, others more flexible, built into the software that needs to read and understand the information. Often one software tool will be required to read in several different types of files from several different sources with several different formats. This adds difficulty and complexity when developing new software tools, or in modifying a software tool following a change in input format. This problem is by no means unique to the world of space operations but the software and concept described in this paper was developed due to there not being a solution that was generic enough to read the variety of files yet tailored enough to our work in operations to allow easy implementation in an operational environment.
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