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3.5.3 VOTable

The VOTableBuilder class reads VOTables; it should handle any table which conforms to the VOTable 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 or (draft) 1.4 specifications (as well as quite a few which violate them). In particular, it can deal with a DATA element whose content is encoded using any of the serialization formats TABLEDATA, BINARY, FITS or (for VOTable version 1.3+) BINARY2.

While VOTable documents often contain a single table, the format describes a hierarchical structure which can contain zero or more TABLE elements. By default, the StarTableFactory.makeStarTable method will find the first one in the document for you, which in the (common) case that the document contains only one table is just what you want. If you're after one of the others, identify it with a zero-based index number after a '#' sign at the end of the table designation. So if the following document is called 'cats.xml':

    <VOTABLE>
      <RESOURCE>
        <TABLE name="Star Catalogue"> ... </TABLE>
        <TABLE name="Galaxy Catalogue"> ... </TABLE>
      </RESOURCE>
    </VOTABLE>
then 'cats.xml' or 'cats.xml#0' refers to the "Star Catalogue" and 'cats.xml#1' refers to the "Galaxy Catalogue".

To retrieve all of the tables from a given VOTable document, use one of the makeStarTables methods of StarTableFactory instead.

Much more detailed information about the VOTable I/O facilities, which can be used independently of the generic I/O described in this section, is given in Section 7.


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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