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The generic table commands in STILTS
(currently tpipe
,
tcopy
,
tcat
,
tcatn
,
tcube
,
tjoin
,
tmatch2
,
multicone
and
regquery
)
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 per-table metadata (parameters)
- A number of columns
- Some per-column metadata
- A number of rows, each containing one entry per column
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.
Next Previous Up Contents
Next: Input Formats
Up: Table I/O
Previous: Table Locations
STILTS - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set
Starlink User Note256
STILTS web page:
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
Author email:
m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk