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B.1 Tablecopy

Tablecopy copies a table from any of the (input-) supported formats into any of the (output-) supported ones. This is pretty trivial, since all the hard work is done using the generic I/O facilities described in Section 3.

The application is the main method of TableCopy, though it might get moved in future releases. Invoking it with the "-help" flag will print a usage message. Assuming STIL is on your classpath:

% java uk.ac.starlink.table.TableCopy -help

Usage: TableCopy [-disk] [-debug] [-h[elp]] [-v[erbose]]
                 [-ifmt <in-format>] [-ofmt <out-format>]
                 <in-table> <out-table>

   Auto-detected in-formats:
      fits-plus
      fits
      votable

   Known in-formats:
      fits-plus
      fits
      votable
      ascii
      csv
      wdc

   Known out-formats:
      jdbc
      fits
      fits-plus
      fits-basic
      votable-tabledata
      votable-binary-inline
      votable-fits-href
      votable-binary-href
      votable-fits-inline
      text
      ascii
      csv
      html
      html-element
      latex
      latex-document
      mirage


The flags and arguments have the following meaning:

-disk
Causes temporary files to be used for backing store when table data must be stored. Use this flag if you're getting an OutOfMemoryError otherwise.
-debug
Causes some logging and error reporting to be more verbose than usual.
-verbose
Causes progress to be reported on standard error during table reading, and possibly some additional logging messages.
-help
Prints a usage message (as above) to standard output.
-ifmt in-format
Specifies the input format to be used (one of the known in-formats listed above - matching is case-insensitive). This flag can be used if you know what format your input table is in. If it's omitted, then an attempt will be made to detect the format of in-table automatically, but this can only be done if it is in one of the auto-detected formats (see Section 3.2. If it is not, the program will exit with an error explaining which formats were attempted.
-ofmt out-format
Specifies the output format to be used (one of the known out-formats listed above - matching is case-insensitive). This flag can be used to determine what format to write to. If it's omitted, then the output filename will be examined to try to guess what sort of file is required (e.g. by looking at the extension). If it doesn't look like any particular known type, the program will exit with an error.
in-table
Location of the input table. This is typically a filename or URL.
out-table
Location of the output table. This is typically a filename to write to. In some cases it can be the special string "-" to indicate output to the standard output stream.

According to how you have downloaded STIL you may alternatively be able to invoke it using the "tablecopy" script.

Here are some examples of use:


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STIL - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library
Starlink User Note 252
STIL web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
Starlink: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/