In several years of processing foreign tournament reports submitted by individual players for ICU rating, it has sadly been rare for data files to comply precisely with the specification. Usually one finds missing data, data in the wrong columns, spurious empty columns, illegal federation codes, badly formatted dates and so on. Such errors mean that the computer program which tries to parse these files and automatically load the information they contain into the ratings database is unable to cope. The rating officer must then fix the problems and try again. The extra work this entails is one of the reasons for levying a small fee for rating foreign tournaments.

However we have just received the first absolutely perfect (down to the last byte) report. It was sent in by David Murray and covered his and Gordon Freeman's performances in the recent Czech Open. Apart from being correct, some of the extra features that help it qualify as perfect are:

• It was submitted in the preferred plain text file format (also known as CSV) instead of Excel. This saves the rating officer one step (converting Excel to text) because the program that analyses the file only accepts text format.
• There were no spurious commas of the sort left behind by Excel when it exports it's native format to text. While these are not errors, they're unnecessary and ugly.
• Draws were represented using the equal symbol ("=") rather than "0.5". While either can be used, "=" is nicer because it is the same length (1 character) as the other result symbols ("1" and "0") allowing the first 3 columns to neatly line up and make the text more readable for a human.

Given their report is the first without error, David and Gordon's foreign rating fees for this tournament have been refunded.

Below is David and Gordon's data file.

Event,"Czech Open 2011"
Start,2011-07-22
End,2011-07-30
Rounds,9
Website,http://www.czechopen.net

Player,4153,Freeman,Gordon
1,0,B,Aliavdin,Nikolai,2392,IM,BLR
2,=,W,Nakar,Eylon,2276,,ISR
3,=,B,Overbeck,Thorsten,2285,FM,GER
4,=,W,Tjurin,Alexander P.,2303,FM,RUS
5,0,B,Heidrich,Manfred,2312,FM,GER
6,0,W,Skacel,Jan,2050,,CZE
7,1,B,Chrz,Pavel,2092,,CZE
8,0,W,Soloviova,Liza,2330,WGM,UKR
9,=,W,Sarkozy,Ladislav,2364,,SVK
Total,3

Player,4941,Murray,David   
1,0,W,Tate,Alan,2342,FM,SCO
2,0,B,Kutynec,Vladimir,2259,IM,RUS
3,0,W,Martynov,Pavel,2237,,RUS
4,=,W,Mirzoeva,Elmira,2234,WGM,RUS
5,=,B,Lyell,Mark,2224,FM,ENG
6,1,B,Vokoun,Jan,2217,FM,CZE
7,1,W,Barthel,Ansgar,2224,,GER
8,=,B,Furman,Boris,2262,FM,RUS
9,1,W,Stastny,Jan,2271,,CZE
Total,4.5