ASCII to RASTER conversion problems

[SteveGranger]

Hi, New to this so bear with me!
I have recently downloaded some .asc elevation data from Digimap and am trying to convert this to rasters, however everytime I use the ASC to Rater tool I encounter the same error messages:
ERROR 010328: Syntax error at or near symbol,.
ERROR 010267: Syntax error in parsing grid expression

I have tried saving the raster to different locations, I have also checked the data to make sure its in the correct format and contains no ',' instead of '.'.

Can anyone help?

[Luke_Pinner]

Post a sample of the asc file.

[SteveGranger]

Hi
Thanks for replying...Im sure the problem is something simple and obvious!
File attached (opened in WordPad).
Screen shot 1 contains the header info for one of the files, While screen shot 2 contains some of the main body of the data further down the file.

Does this help?

Steve

[DuncanHornby · Accepted solution]

When you set the raster output name you should always use 8 characters or less, does not start with a number, uses a..z and 0..9 are characters only and don't place your grid in a folder with spaces or other weird characters. So avoid "documents & settings" as this has spaces and an & symbol.

Keep your folder structure and naming convention simple. This does mean the naming convention can become quite cryptic but then thats what metadata is for...

File geodatabases can support rasters with longer names.

Duncan

[SteveGranger]

Hi
Thanks for this. I'll give it a try in a min. Is this just generic advice for most ARCGIS functions, or specifically for the problem I'm having?

Steve

[DuncanHornby]

Definitely for ESRI grids but also good practise for other datasets. For example if you create a bunch of shapefiles starting with numbers then decide to import them into a geodatabase, you cannot, as geodatabases do not support tables beginning with numbers or contain spaces\weird characters.

So avoid shooting yourself in the foot all the time and employ a strict, simple, naming convention backed up with simple metadata to explain the name if it gets a bit cryptic (which it can if you start generating hundreds of datasets).

If you start geo-processing with crazy names then python/model builder will blow up and cause you a head ache. And they do get crazy, some "expert" consultant was sending me data with commas and superscript 2's in the dataset name...

[SteveGranger]

Yes, thanks for this advice. It certainly seemed to be the problem. I have a space in the file name. Once I removed it then the rasters were created no problem! Simples.
Now to work out out to merge all the rasters into one complete dataset! I like working with this sort of data, but the software would appear to require that I be working with it all the time...so as to be completly at one with it...borg like. Still, it does look good when its done, and I get some interesting data.

Cheers
Steve
(will probably post again soon! :p)

[DuncanHornby]

Steve,

For the benefit of others you should mark you post as answered and are encouraged to vote up or down answers/questions.

Duncan

[AyeshaAnwar]

hi I Still have this problem I am not saving any output name with space or any character but still it is giving me this syntax error. I make interpolation map than save it to as vector than use it it as my input and it gives me same error
Kindly help me to solve this error.