Decode zs2 files generated by Zwick Universal Testing Machines¶
zs2decode reads Zwick Roell zs2 and zp2 file formats.
It can generate XML files for convenient extraction of measurements
and meta data. The proprietory zs2 file format is generated by
testXpert II and testXpert III, the control software of
Zwick Roell Materials Testing Machines.
zs2 files contain data in a compressed, binary-encoded
XML-like structure. The binary data stream is comprised of chunks
similar to PNG files.
zs2decode is a Python (2.7, 3.4 - 3.10) implementation of a
zs2 file decoder. It can be obtained from the
GitHub repository.
In order to convert a zs2 file into XML, the following
script can be used:
import zs2decode.parser
import zs2decode.util
zs2_file_name = 'my_data_file.zs2'
xml_output_file = 'my_data_file.xml'
# load and decompress file
data_stream = zs2decode.parser.load(zs2_file_name)
# separate binary data stream into chunks
raw_chunks = zs2decode.parser.data_stream_to_chunks(data_stream)
# convert binary chunk data into lists of Python objects
chunks = zs2decode.parser.parse_chunks(raw_chunks)
# output as XML file
with open(xml_output_file, 'wb') as f:
f.write( zs2decode.util.chunks_to_XML(chunks) )
The output of zs2decode can be used to extract meta data, acquision parameters and measurements. An example script is provided to extract raw measurements from the XML output.
The zs2 file format specification is not distributed publicly.
All information in this document comes from reverse-engineering of
files written by testXpert II version 3.1 and user feedback on
the github issue tracker.
This project is not associated with Zwick Roell.
The zs2 file format is unrelated to the
zs file format for compressed sets of Nathaniel J. Smith.