I've repeatedly come across the need to read or write Raster files in Java. These are data files which represent a rectangular grid of data using ASCII representations of numbers. An example, from GeoTools:
ncols 157
nrows 171
xllcorner -156.08749650000
yllcorner 18.870890200000
cellsize 0.00833300
nodata_value -9999
0 0 1 1 1 2 3 3 5 6 8 9 12 14 18 21 25 30 35 41 47 53
59 66 73 79 86 92 97 102 106 109 112 113 113 113 111 109 106
All values can be doubles or ints.
