The table output handlers supplied with STIL are listed in this
section, along with any peculiarities they have in writing a
StarTable to a destination given by a string
(usually a filename).
As described in Section 3.4, a StarTableOutput
will under normal circumstances permit output of a table in any
of these formats. Which format is used is determined by the
"format" string passed to
StarTableOutput.writeStarTable
as described in the following subsections.
If a null format string
is supplied, the name of the destination string may be used
to select a format (e.g. a destination ending ".fits" will, unless
otherwise specified, result in writing FITS format).
Alternatively, the format-specific
StarTableWriter
implementation classes themselves can be used directly.
These have configuration methods corresponding to the
format name options listed below; consult the relevant
javadocs for details.
The main advantage of using a StarTableOutput to mediate
between output handler implementations
is to make it easy to switch between output formats,
especially if this is being done by the user at runtime.