Section Requirements

Section Type	Requirements
All sections	Data items cannot contain commas. Supported line endings are \n, \r\n, and . Required characters are all ASCII characters except for * and the control characters CR and LF.
Standalone	Only key-value pairs are supported. Each key must have exactly one value. The same key cannot be specified more than one time in a single standalone section. Opening and closing brackets are both required, and must be the first and last character in the section header line (other than whitespace and commas). A standalone section cannot be empty. Data in standalone sections must not contain brackets.
Header	There can only be one data item in a section header line. Section headers are required to start with an opening square bracket, and end with a closing square bracket Opening and closing brackets are both required, and must be the first and last character in the section header line (other than whitespace and commas)
Application	The application name cannot include Settings or Data. The application name cannot be empty. The application name cannot include -. Each application can have a maximum of one Settings section and one Data section.
Application Settings	Settings sections can support only key-value pairs. Each key can have only one value. The application name cannot include -. Applications sections cannot be empty. At least one key-value pair must be specified. Keys and values cannot contain [ or ]. Note: The Settings section is applied globally to all samples.
Application Data	For each line that follows the column header line in the application data section, the number of empty plus non-empty data items cannot be less than the number of column headers. For each line that follows the column header line in the Application Data section, the number of non-empty values cannot be greater than the number of column headers. Column headers must all be unique. Each application data section must contain a column header called Sample_ID. Column headers and values cannot contain [ or ]. Note: The Data section is uniquely applied to each sample.