[AstroPy] pfiles

[rlw at stsci.edu]

Hi Warren,

>Has anyone written code to deal with IRAF/FTOOL style par files?
>Even a nice wrapper for pquery would be useful.

Our PyRAF system has a bunch of code for dealing with IRAF .par files.
You can get it at pyraf.stsci.edu -- look at irafpar.py for the
parameter file stuff.  It has a lot of features: it generates a list of
parameters that have constrained types & values (as specified by the
.par file), and there is a GUI parameter editor.

Unfortunately it may be a bit of a pain to use it outside of pyraf,
because there is quite a bit of entanglement between parameter handling
and the IRAF interface.  I expect you'll find this module is a lot more
complicated than you expected because there are some pretty peculiar
aspects to IRAF parameters that make it hard to separate the parameter
handling from IRAF task handling.  (E.g., did you know that a parameter
can have a value like ')imstatistics.lower', which is an indirect
reference to the 'lower' parameter of the imstatistics task?)  Probably
you could use it outside pyraf with a little work.  Or maybe you'll be
able to find another module that is easier to use in your application.

One of our projects is to cleanly separate pyraf into pieces that
depend on IRAF and those that can be used without IRAF.  If you have
suggestions for what you'd like to see in a generic parameter
interface, I'd welcome them.
					Rick White
_____________________________________________________
AstroPy mailing list  -  astropy at stsci.edu
http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/~bridgman/AstroPy/