EPD

Extended Position Description is a standard for describing chess positions along with an extended set of structured attribute values using the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set. It is intended for data and command interchange among chess playing programs. It is also intended for the representation of portable opening library repositories. The first four fields of the EPD specification are the same as the first four fields of the closely related FEN specification. Like FEN, EPD can also be used for general position description. However, unlike FEN, EPD is designed to be expandable by the addition of new operations that provide new functionality as needs arise. A text file composed exclusively of EPD data records should have a file name with “.epd” as the suffix.