GDAL supports reading and writing the ESRI .hdr labeling format, often referred to as ESRI BIL format. Eight, sixteen and thirty-two bit integer raster data types are supported as well as 32 bit floating point. Coordinate systems (from a .prj file), and georeferencing are supported. Unrecognized options in the .hdr file are ignored. To open a dataset select the file with the image file (often with the extension .bil). If present .clr color table files are read, but not written. If present, image.rep file will be read to extract the projection system of SpatioCarte Defense 1.0 raster products.

This driver does not always do well differentiating between floating point and integer data. The GDAL extension to the .hdr format to differentiate is to add a field named PIXELTYPE with values of either FLOAT, SIGNEDINT or UNSIGNEDINT. In combination with the NBITS field it is possible to described all variations of pixel types.

eg.

ncols 1375
nrows 649
cellsize 0.050401
xllcorner -130.128639
yllcorner 20.166799
nodata_value 9999.000000
nbits 32
pixeltype float
byteorder msbfirst

This driver may be sufficient to read GTOPO30 data.

NOTE: Implemented as ehdrdataset.cpp.