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3.6 Supplied Output Handlers

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 indicated in the following table; 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).

    Format string         Format written               Associated file extension
    -------------         --------------               -------------------------
    jdbc                  SQL database
    fits                  FITS binary table              .fits, .fit, .fts
    votable-tabledata     TABLEDATA-format VOTable       .xml, .vot
    votable-binary-inline Inline BINARY-format VOTable
    votable-binary-href   External BINARY-format VOTable
    votable-fits-inline   Inline FITS-format VOTable
    votable-fits-href     External FITS-format VOTable
    text                  Human-readable plain text      .txt
    ascii                 Machine-readable text
    csv                   Comma-separated value          .csv
    csv-noheader          Comma-sep. values, no header
    html                  Standalone HTML document       .html, .htm
    html-element          HTML TABLE element
    latex                 LaTeX tabular environment      .tex
    latex-document        LaTeX freestanding document
    mirage                Mirage input format
More detail on all these formats is given in the following sections.

In some cases, more control can be exercised over the exact output format by using the format-specific table writers themselves (these are listed in the following sections), since they may offer additional configuration methods. The only advantage of using a StarTableOutput to mediate between them is to make it easy to switch between output formats, especially if this is being done by the user at runtime.


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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/