The European Pulsar Network ("EPN'') is an association of European astrophysical research institutes that co-operate in the subject of pulsar research. All institutes have up until now developed their own individual hardware and software facilities tailored to their own requirements and will, of course, continue to do so in future. Contact and co-operation has always existed between the scientists of the member institutes and outside, but the lack of a common standard format for pulsar data has hampered previous collaborative research efforts.
In this paper, we describe a flexible format that we have developed for exchanging data between EPN pulsar groups. The format has some generic similarities to the widely used FITS format (Wells et al. 1981) but has been designed to meet the specific needs of the EPN. The format has proved so successful that we now advocate its use as a useful world-wide utility for pulsar data exchange. To aid implementation of the format, we have written a suite of freely available Fortran-77 sub-routines which can be easily incorporated within existing software to read and write data in this format. Astrophysical applications of such a format currently being pursued by EPN groups include the establishment of a data bank of pulse profiles as well as simultaneous observations of pulsars by several European observatories.