[AstroPy] Abbreviated data types in IPAC tables

[Thomas Robitaille]

Astropy can actually read many ASCII formats (including IPAC) in
addition to FITS, VO Tables, etc. This is just an issue related to
abbreviated data types (i.e. it works fine when the data types are
complete).

Cheers,
Tom

Paul Kuin wrote:
> I was under the impression that astropy reads FITS, and it looks like
> the IPAC ascii table standard is incompatable. Perhaps IPAC can elaborate?
> 
> On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 3:35 AM, Gregory Simonian
> <simonian.7 at buckeyemail.osu.edu <mailto:simonian.7 at buckeyemail.osu.edu>>
> wrote:
> 
>     Hi all,
> 
>     I'm trying to read in an IPAC table from the WISE IRSA catalog using
>     Astropy v4.1, which for some columns abbreviate "double" as "doubl". At
>     first I thought this was a bug in the database, but I was informed that
>     abbreviations off the end are actually a legal part of the standard.[0]
> 
>     However, whenever I try to read it using astropy, I get the error:
> 
>     In [2]: Table.read("test_output.tbl", format="ascii.ipac", guess=False)
>     <snip>
>     ValueError: Unknown data type ""doubl"" for column "w1ba"
> 
>     Is this a part of the standard that hasn't been implemented yet in
>     astropy? Or is there some setting that I haven't found that will enable
>     this to work? Or am I just doing something wrong? I've attached a small
>     output file that reproduces this error for anyone that's curious.
>     Thanks!
> 
>                                        Gregory Simonian
> 
>     [0] http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/applications/DDGEN/Doc/ipac_tbl.html
> 
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> 
> 
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> 
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