ATpy - Astronomical Tables in Python

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ATpy is a high-level Python package providing a way to manipulate tables of astronomical data in a uniform way. The two main features of ATpy are:

• It provides a Table class that contains data stored in a NumPy structured array, along with meta-data to describe the columns, and methods to manipulate the table (e.g. adding/removing/renaming columns, selecting rows, changing values, sorting, ...).
• It provides built-in support for reading and writing to several common file/database formats, including FITS, VO, and IPAC tables, and SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, with a very simple API.

In addition, ATpy provides a TableSet class that can be used to contain multiple tables, and supports reading and writing to file/database formats that support this (FITS, VO, and SQL databases).

Finally, ATpy provides support for user-written read/write functions for file/database formats not supported by default. We encourage users to send us custom read/write functions to read commonly used formats, and would be happy to integrate them into the main distribution.

The following example shows how ATpy can be used to read, convert, and write a data file from FITS format to VO, IPAC, and SQLite formats:

import atpy
tbl = atpy.Table('some_fits_table_file.fits')

# ATpy will automatically try to detect which type of file you're writing.
tbl.write('new_votable.xml')                 # VO Table
tbl.write('new_ipactable.tbl')               # IPAC table
tbl.write('sqlite','new_sqlitetable.db')     # SQLite database

# You can easily access and modify data in the table:
tbl.some_column[3] = 4.5
tbl.remove_column('some_other_column')

This is only a small fraction of ATpy’s functionality. We strongly recommend that users read through the documentation, which is available below.

• Installation
• Constructing a table
  • Creating a table
  • Populating the table
  • Adding meta-data
• Accessing Table Data
  • Accessing the data
  • Accessing the metadata
  • Accessing table rows
  • Global Table properties
• Modifying tables
  • Manipulating table columns
  • Sorting tables
  • Combining tables
• Table Sets
  • Initialization
  • Manually adding a table to a set
  • Reading in tables from a file or database
  • Accessing a single table
  • Adding meta-data
• Masking and null values
  • Null values
  • Masking
• Custom reading/writing
• Supported Formats
  • FITS Table
  • FITS Table Set
  • IPAC Table
  • VO Table
  • VO Table Set
  • SQL Table
  • SQL Table Set
• Full API for Table class
  • Table initialization and I/O
  • Meta-data
  • Column manipulation
  • Table manipulation and selection
• Full API for TableSet class
  • TableSet initialization and I/O
  • Meta-data
  • TableSet manipulation and I/O