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STILTS provides a number of command-line applications which can
be used for manipulating tabular data.
Conceptually it sits between, and uses many of the same classes as,
the packages
STIL,
which is a set of Java APIs providing table-related functionality, and
TOPCAT,
which is a graphical application providing the user with
an interactive platform for exploring one or more tables.
This document is mostly self-contained - it covers some of the
same ground as the STIL and TOPCAT user documents
(SUN/252 and SUN/253 respectively).
Currently, this package consists of four commands:
-
tcopy
:
Table Format Converter
-
tpipe
:
Generic Table Pipeline Utility
-
votcopy
:
VOTable Encoding Translator
-
votlint
:
VOTable Validity Checker
It is expected that more will be introduced in the future,
in particular a crosssmatching tool and perhaps some more convenience
commands which make it easier to do some of the operations
provided by tpipe
.
There are many ways you might want to use these tools;
here are a few possibilities:
-
In conjunction with TOPCAT
- you can identify a set of processing steps using TOPCAT's interactive
graphical facilities, and construct a script using the commands
provided here which can perform the same steps on many
similar tables without further user intervention.
-
Format conversion
- If you have a separate table processing engine and you want to
be able to output the results in a somewhat different form,
for instance converting it from FITS to VOTable, or from
TABLEDATA-encoded to BINARY-encoded VOTable, you can pass the
results through one of the tools here. Since on the whole
operation is streaming, the conversion can easily and
efficiently be done on the
fly, for instance as part of a web service providing a choice of
output formats.
-
Quick look
- You might want to examine the metadata, or a few rows,
or a statistical summary of a table
without having to load the whole thing into TOPCAT or some other
table viewer application.
This release of STILTS is beta software.
While all the functions are believed to be working, the interface
(command line arguments etc) may undergo changes in the future.
All user comments are most welcome.
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Next: Invocation
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STILTS - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set
Starlink User Note
256
STILTS web page:
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
Author email:
m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk