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 noMore 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.