Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
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The idf_max_fields, idf_max_extensible_fields, and idf_order fields are used internally in EnergyPlus when an IDF is automatically converted to epJSON. These fields are needed to make sure the input IDF is faithfully represented in epJSON format, however, when using epJSON directly you should not use these fields in the input file. In EnergyPlus 9.2, these fields are no longer output when using the -c command line flag.
idf_max_fields is not just the max number of fields in the epJSON but rather the max fields set in the IDF file. In your example, this likely means that there were 5 blank fields after the last field with a value, but this is still recorded as 19 max fields.
That said, it is odd that EnergyPlus gives a severe/fatal error when you manually set the max fields to 14. I will need to investigate that, but basically you should not be setting or using those three fields listed at the top of this answer when you use epJSON. It is an artifact of the automatic conversion within EnergyPlus and should not have been output originally.
