SGF

    Keywords: Software

SGF is an abbreviation for Smart Game Format, which has become a common file format.

Table of contents

About the format

The SGF file format is designed to store game records of board games for two players. It's a text-only, tree-based format.

Games stored in SGF format can easily be emailed, posted or processed with text-based tools.

The main purposes of SGF are to store records of played games and to provide features for storing annotated and analyzed games (e.g. board markup, variations).

Furthermore, a lot of information about the game can be added to a SGF file:

There is no strict checking of the contents of these tags, so it is possible to put any text into the result tag for example.


SGF format example

This is an example of a tsumego problem stored in SGF format. Please note that this example comes from [ext] GoProblems. See that site for copyright information.

 (
 ;GM[1]FF[3]
 RU[Japanese]SZ[19]HA[0]KM[5.5]
 PW[White]
 PB[Black]
 GN[Copyright goproblems.com]
 DT[1999-07-21]TM[1800]
 ;C[Black to play and live.]
 AW[bb][cb][cc][cd][de][df][cg][ch][dh][ai][bi][ci]
 AB[ba][ab][ac][bc][bd][be][cf][bg][bh]
 (;B[af];W[ah]
 (;B[ce];W[ag] C[only one eye this way])
 (;B[ag];W[ce])
 )
 (;B[ah];W[af]
 (;B[ae];W[bf];B[ag];W[bf]
 (;B[af];W[ce] C[oops! you can't take this stone])
 (;B[ce];W[af];B[bg] C[RIGHT black plays under the stones and lives])
 )
 (;B[bf];W[ae])
 )
 (;B[ae];W[ag])
 )

Specific tools


Other software that can handle SGF

%to review: just list the apps, go there for more blabla; no ads here (the respective pages are great ads).

Notes

Most Go servers are able to send you an SGF file of a game you played. SGF files are used by many Go editing programs and are even used on rec.games.go.

Sensei's Library also uses SGF files - all the diagrams on SL can be downloaded as SGF simply by clicking on them (see How Diagrams Work).


Links


This is a copy of the living page "SGF" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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