Name
dtfits - display FITS table
Synopsis
dtfits <table>
Description
dtfits dumps the contents of a FITS table in an ASCII for-
mat, either into a user-specified file or on stdout. The
output is formatted on a fixed number of columns to make
it readable by human beings, the width of each column can
be changed by using the -w option. Additional informations
are printed out before the table values are dumped, these
informations can be skipped by using the -d option.
Last, if you want to dump the table into an easily
parsable format (for a piece of software), you might want
to use the -s option which specifies a character to use as
separator. All data fields will be printed out separated
by this character only. This allows to use string parsers
to cut down the output lines into tokens by looking for
this separator. Fields (lines) will still be delimited by
the end-of-line character. This option produces ASCII
tables which are easy to parse for a piece of software but
mostly unreadable to human beings.
Notice that dtfits only accepts one single FITS table in
input.
Options
-w width
Change the column width of the ouput to width char-
acters.
-d Skip information output about the table and column
names. Outputs only the table values. Beware that
if the FITS file contains several extensions, they
will all appear one after another, separated only
by two blank lines. In that case, it would be pre-
ferrable to keep the complete output and parse out
the returned stream to differentiate which data
come from where.
-s <char>
Use the character <char> as separator in output.
This option is useful if you want to produce a
table that should be parsed by a piece of software
(see above description). The separator can only be
a single non-null character. To avoid special char-
acters being interpreted by the shell, it is recom-
mended to provide this character always between
simple or double quotes. Example:
dtfits -s '&' table.tfits
If you want to use a special character as separator, such
as a tab, use ^V to insert your character, such as:
dtfits -s '^V<TAB>' table.tfits
which means: you type CTRL-V and then the tab key.
See Also
dfits
Files
FITS tables are stored into extensions. If there are sev-
eral tables in a file, they will all be displayed one
after another in the same output stream.
Some data types are not supported in tables (e.g. complex
numbers). Atom sizes greater than 1 are also not sup-
ported for many data types (bit, character, etc.). If the
need arises to support that kind of format, it will be
implemented later on.