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4 Table Formats

The generic table commands in STILTS (currently tpipe, tcopy, tcat, tcube and tmatch2) have no native format for table storage, they can process data in a number of formats equally well. STIL has its own model of what a table consists of, which is basically:

Some table formats have better facilities for storing this sort of thing than others, and when performing conversions STILTS does its best to translate between them, but it can't perform the impossible: for instance there is nowhere in a Comma-Separated Values file to store descriptions of column units, so these will be lost when converting from VOTable to CSV formats.

The formats the package knows about are dependent on the input and output handlers currently installed. The ones installed by default are listed in the following subsections. More may be added in the future, and it is possible to install new ones at runtime - see the STIL documentation for details.


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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