Easily parsable format?

hey,

I want to store a lot of data on my hard drive and I'd like it to be easy to retrieve/play with the data once it's stored..

I don't want to "re-invent" the wheel so to speak as I don't have a lot of time unfortunately (money == tight).
Thanks BHW

Pack/Unpack for PHP: http://php.net/manual/en/function.pack.php

Use json. Very popular, supported in virtually any languages via libs.