Trailer (information technology)
Encyclopedia
In information technology
, trailer refers to supplemental data
placed at the end of a block of data being stored or transmitted, which may contain information for the handling of the data block, or just mark its end.
In data transmission, the data following the end of the header
and preceding the start of the trailer is called the payload or body.
It is vital that trailer composition follow a clear and unambiguous specification or format
, to allow for parsing
. If a trailer is not removed properly, or part of the payload is removed thinking it is a trailer, it can cause confusion.
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
, trailer refers to supplemental data
Data
The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...
placed at the end of a block of data being stored or transmitted, which may contain information for the handling of the data block, or just mark its end.
In data transmission, the data following the end of the header
Header (information technology)
In information technology, header refers to supplemental data placed at the beginning of a block of data being stored or transmitted. In data transmission, the data following the header are sometimes called the payload or body....
and preceding the start of the trailer is called the payload or body.
It is vital that trailer composition follow a clear and unambiguous specification or format
File format
A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...
, to allow for parsing
Parsing
In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a text, made of a sequence of tokens , to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given formal grammar...
. If a trailer is not removed properly, or part of the payload is removed thinking it is a trailer, it can cause confusion.
Examples
- In data transfer, the OSI data link layer adds a trailer at the end of the data encapsulating.