Is this a ASCII file output of a shapefile?

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I have a ASCII file titled coastline.dat.It is read by a FORTRAN file and converted into NETCDF output. A MATLAB file plot displays the coastlines of Europe. There is no documentation whatsoever on what the contents of coastline.dat is as I am inheriting this code from someone else. I am assuming that the coastline.dat file is the ASCII content of coastlines of Europe originally derived from a binary ESRI shapefile. In order to do something similar for my continent(Asia) is it adequate that I download a ESRI shapefile of Asia and read it in using a programming language of my choice and then write it out in that format ? Here is a sample of the ASCII file coastlines.dat -

-999. -999.

0.192440 5.669954

-0.114995 5.515063

-0.391921 5.360171

-0.657114 5.195893

-0.887104 5.151303

-1.262597 5.062123

-1.417488 5.008146

-1.560645 4.874377

-1.736658 4.775809

-1.936139 4.686630

-2.198985 4.787544

-2.410200 4.874377

-2.595600 4.930701

-2.771612 4.951822

-999. -999.

-2.771612 4.951822

-2.860792 4.963556

-3.003949 4.975290

-3.301997 5.052736

-3.611779 5.106713

-3.832382 5.184159

-4.238384 5.163037

-4.679589 5.106713

-5.198240 5.041002

-5.341397 5.008146

-5.430576 5.017534

-5.585468 4.984678

-5.848313 4.918966

-6.080650 4.796931

-6.223807 4.754688

-6.444409 4.677242

-6.643890 4.599797

-6.787047 4.543473

-6.873880 4.489496

-7.106217 4.388582

-7.293964 4.278280

-7.491098 4.257159

and so on...



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