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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  Multiple Tables?
    -------------         --------------               -------------------------  ----------------
    jdbc                  SQL database                                                 no
    fits, fits-plus       FITS-plus binary table         .fits, .fit, .fts            yes
    fits-basic            FITS binary table                                           yes
    fits-var              FITS with var-length arrays                                 yes
    colfits               Column-oriented FITS           .colfits                      no
    votable-tabledata     TABLEDATA-format VOTable       .xml, .vot                   yes
    votable-binary-inline Inline BINARY-format VOTable                                yes
    votable-binary-href   External BINARY-format VOTable                              yes
    votable-fits-inline   Inline FITS-format VOTable                                  yes
    votable-fits-href     External FITS-format VOTable                                yes
    text                  Human-readable plain text      .txt                         yes
    ascii                 Machine-readable text                                        no
    csv                   Comma-separated value          .csv                          no
    csv-noheader          Comma-sep. values, no header                                 no
    html                  Standalone HTML document       .html, .htm                  yes
    html-element          HTML TABLE element                                          yes
    latex                 LaTeX tabular environment      .tex                          no
    latex-document        LaTeX freestanding document                                  no
    mirage                Mirage input format                                          no
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 Note252
STIL web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk