I was preparing an introduction to hansl for my students and I was thinking of a simple way to introduce a few data.
I remembered that putting the variables in columns in a text file (with extension .dat or .txt), gretl open them quite easily. And I have experimented a little with it, but I found something weird (on ubuntu 12.04 with unity, and gretl from current CVS):
 
1) right-cliking on the file and selecting "open with" and then "gretl", the file is directly open. No problem.
2) from a terminal, if I use the command "gretlcli file.dat" or in interactive way "gretlcli" and "open file.dat" the file is also directly opened without problem
3) opening first the gretl GUI, if you have done 1) first and gretl remembers the file in the recently open files list you will have no problem,
4) but from the GUI, opening the file through '/File/Open data/User file'  I obtain the error

xmlParseFile failed on /home/ignacio/gretl/file.dat

If I call the gui from a terminal, gretl is reporting this error on the terminal screen:

/home/ignacio/gretl/file.dat:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found
xt    yt
^
--
Firma Arista
Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza
Zuzendaria/Director
ignacio.diaz-emparanza@ehu.es
94 6013732
EKONOMIA APLIKATUA III SAILA (EKONOMETRIA ETA ESTATISTIKA)/ DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA APLICADA III (ECONOMETRÍA Y ESTADÍSTICA)
UPV/EHU
Avda. Lehendakari Aguirre, 83 | 48015 BILBAO
T.: +34 946013740 | F.: +34 946013754
 www.ea3.ehu.es
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