[AstroPy] Write machine readable tables in Python?

[Leo Singer]

Hi Paul,

Well, that's another question: what format is easiest to use for most readers to ingest published data into their own work? MRT can be read as either fixed-width or whitespace-delimited ASCII, so it seems fine as a least common denominator.

This particular dataset is a catalog of ~1000 simulated binary neutron star mergers from a Monte Carlo study of sky localization accuracy with Advanced LIGO and Virgo. Each row contains the parameters of the simulated binary including component masses and spins, sky location, inclination, luminosity distance, as well as parameters about the recovered signal, such as the SNR in each detector, and area of the 90% credible region.

Leo

On Apr 11, 2014, at 12:20 PM, Paul Kuin <npkuin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Are you sure that you can't just send it as (a) FITS file(s) + a readme - then you should not need the format tables at all?
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 8:09 PM, Paul Kuin <npkuin at gmail.com> wrote:
> .I worked in with francois Ochsenbein of the CDS to pin down the original format. He developed some tools in C that are useful. One will build a format table for the data file. So the following scenario would seem to make sense. I will need to look all this up as it has been nearly 20 years ago. But basically we we built then the tools to do automatic reformatting, verification and ingest of the ascii tables in the archive. 
> 1. write ascii tables using astropy; keep a list of header names.
> 2. reformat the tables to a standard form (I think there's a C script to do that.
> 3. run the format table generator; perhaps the barebones ReadMe file is better. (C script)
> Then you have the ascii tables, and Readme which will need some editing by hand to fill in the abstract and add notes and such. 
> 
> I'll have to look into this and email Francois, since he wrote the stuff 20 years ago. Should be no big deal. 
> 
> I think that this may take a few days ... 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 7:54 PM, Kevin Gullikson <kevin.gullikson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Leo,
> 
> As far as implementing a writer in Astropy, the trickiest part would be writing the Fortran-style format strings. Probably the most reliable method would be to write the table data using the existing fixed-width formatter, then read it back to deduce the format string.
> 
> I have used the fortranformat package for fortran-format strings in the past. I've found that the string formatting in python has a really hard time getting everything right for input to fortran programs.
> 
> 
> Kevin Gullikson
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Leo Singer <lsinger at caltech.edu> wrote:
> Hi Paul,
> 
> I think that I need to write both the ASCII table and the ReadMe header section. I am preparing some Machine Readable Tables for inclusion in an an ApJ submission, following the guidelines here:
> https://aas.org/authors/online-only-materials-guidelines
> 
> I wrote a little script to send an astropy.table.Table instance to the AAS machine readable table converter form. That form is here:
> http://authortools.aas.org/MRT/upload.html
> 
> And the script is here:
> https://gist.github.com/lpsinger/10489886
> 
> As far as implementing a writer in Astropy, the trickiest part would be writing the Fortran-style format strings. Probably the most reliable method would be to write the table data using the existing fixed-width formatter, then read it back to deduce the format string.
> 
> Leo
> 
> On Apr 10, 2014, at 4:28 PM, Paul Kuin <npkuin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Do you mean that you need to generate the ascii tables as well as the format tables for the ReadMe file?  
>> 
>> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 11:21 PM, Leo Singer <lsinger at caltech.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Does anyone know of a tool for writing Machine Readable Tables (CDS format) in Python? I know that astropy.table and asciitable can read them, but I need to write one.
> 
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