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Name

table - (ASCII) table format

Description

A table file is a simple ASCII text file, structured in rows and columns, with one row per line. Columns can be separated by spaces, commas, vertical bars, or tabs (though many dialects of this definition exist which we will try and support). The number of columns per row does not have to be the same, as long as the columns accessed are in the specified range. Some programs, e.g. tablint(1NEMO) , may put restrictions on this though.

Comments can be entered by using the octothorpe (’#’) symbol on the first character on a line (though again, many dialects exist, most notably the exclamation, semi-colon and backslash (IPAC tables) symbols are in practice. Empty lines will generally be skipped too, and as said, some programs even skip lines starting with the ! or ; symbol. See also tabcomment(1NEMO) for some other filtering techniques.

NEMO tables can also contain commands that plot certainly variations of the table using the ’#PLOT’ directives and the nemoplot(8NEMO) command.

HEADER
D11 D12 D13 ....
D21 D22 ...
...

Where DIJ refers to the I-th row and J-th column. The HEADER can be in a number of formats (optional #, verbatim column names, with or without comma’s etc.)

Example

Here is an example of a table with only 2 valid rows and 3 columns:

# This is the first line of the table
# I N Q # names of columns in case they
1.0 2.0 4.0
# 2.0 3.0 5.0 bad data, commented out.
3.0 5.1 6.32 # comment belonging to a line
# End of table

Here is an example how to make a table from scratch. It contains one column, with even numbers 2 through 10, done with nemoinp(1NEMO) and seq(1)

nemoinp 2:10:2 newline=t > even1.tab
seq 2 2 10 > even2.tab
tabgen - 10 3 > random.tab

where for performance testing the tabgen(1NEMO) program can be used to create random large tables.

Other Table Formats

ESO/Midas, where all columns are separated by TABs. The unix program paste(1) will by default put a TAB between the columns (files).

FITS uses the ’TABLE’ (ascii tables) and ’BINTABLE’ (binary tables) format. See fits(5NEMO) .

IPAC-table format: (often using the extension .tbl) 

\HISTORY some history on the data processing
\HISTORY infile=data3.fits
\char Comment This table contains parameters for calibrating science data.
\char INSTRUME = ’MIPS’
\int CHNLNUM = 2
\char Index = ’counter for row entry’
\char fluxconv    = ’conversion factors from DN/sec to microJy/arcsec^(2)’
\char errfluxconv = ’uncertainties for fluxconv’
\char gain        = ’gain values’
\char latcoeff    = ’latent coupling coefficients’
\char inconst     = ’incomprehensible parity constants’
\HISTORY tune=54
|Index |fluxconv  |errfluxconv |gain    |latcoeff |inconst |
|int   |double    |double      |double  |double   |real    |
|      |Jy/K      |Jy/K        |        | K       |cm      |
 1      1.34       0.05         5.34     3.14      1.21
 2      1.54       0.04         4.23     3.21      1.71
 3      1.41       0.03         4.67     3.54      1.31
 4      1.78       0.08         5.21     3.45      1.54

AstroRES is the format that preceded VOTable, and is an XML-based header, with ascii formatted data. E.g. the <DATA> portion of the data can sometimes be read via tabcomment: 

<DATA><CSV colsep="|" headlines="2" ><![CDATA[
   _r |  GSC-id  |RA2000 |DE2000  |Err|Bmag|Err|m
arcmin|----------|deg    |deg   |arcsrc|mag|mag|
0.0146|0430201297|00 13 00.93|+72 31 19.9|3.6|8.59|0.20|0
0.9704|0430200545|00 12 50.07|+72 30 48.2|0.2|12.18|0.34|0
0.9730|0430200545|00 12 50.04|+72 30 48.1|0.2|12.09|0.20|0
1.5843|0430202363|00 12 44.05|+72 30 22.6|0.2|14.38|0.34|0
2.8586|0430200269|00 12 33.10|+72 29 22.6|0.3|14.96|0.20|3
2.9198|0430200153|00 13 24.64|+72 33 38.3|0.2|12.89|0.20|0
2.9215|0430200153|00 13 24.66|+72 33 38.4|0.2|13.06|0.34|0
3.0487|0430202336|00 12 53.35|+72 34 18.7|0.2|14.38|0.34|0
3.2247|0430200121|00 13 36.48|+72 29 30.2|0.2|12.39|0.21|0
3.2269|0430200121|00 13 36.46|+72 29 29.8|0.2|12.50|0.34|0
]]></CSV></DATA>
</TABLE>

The starbase format (http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/catalogs/starbase/starbase.5.html) also uses a TAB to separate columns, and uses a simple header to name the columns, example: 

RA    Dec
--    ---
0:0:0    0:0:0
12:00    -30.0
15    60:00:30.4

The ECVS (Enhanced Character Separated Values) is extension to the generic ascii table format, except it has a commented YAML header encoding the units, and one extra annoying (YMMV) row with column names: 

# %ECSV 0.9
# ---
# datatype:
# - {name: a, unit: m / s, datatype: int64, format: ’%03d’}
# - {name: b, unit: km, datatype: int64, description: This is column b}
a b
001 2
004 3

See Also

nemoinp(1NEMO) , tabcomment(1NEMO) , table(3NEMO) , awk(1) , paste(1) , ffe(1) , column(1) , nemoplot(8NEMO)

FFE: (flat file extractor): http://ff-extractor.sourceforge.net/

ECSV: https://github.com/astropy/astropy-APEs/blob/master/APE6.rst

cvskit: https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

GNU astronomy: https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-text-table-format.html

XSV: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv

tablator: https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/tablator

Author

Peter Teuben

Update History


1-feb-93    document created      PJT
25-oct-03    some more docs on other table formats    PJT
17-mar-2022    changes for table-V2    PJT

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