5.2.2 Output Formats

Some of the tools ask you to specify the format of output tables using the ofmt parameter. The following list gives the values usually allowed for this; in some cases as you can see there are several variants of a given format. You can abbreviate these names, and the first match in the list below will be used, so for instance specifying votable is equivalent to specifying votable-tabledata and fits is equivalent to fits-plus. Matching is case-insensitive.

fits-plus

FITS file; primary HDU contains a VOTable representation of the metadata, subsequent extensions contain one or more FITS binary tables (behaves the same as fits-basic for most purposes)

fits-basic

FITS file; primary HDU is data-less, subsequent extensions contain a FITS binary table

fits-var

FITS file; like fits-basic, but the FITS P and Q format types are used where appropriate to write variable-length array columns.

fits-healpix

FITS file conforming to the HEALPix-FITS serialization convention. This resembles fits-basic, but can only be used for writing tables containing HEALPix pixel data, and will rearrange column sequence and names to follow the convention if necessary.

colfits-plus

FITS file containing a BINTABLE with a single row; each cell of the row contains a whole column's worth of data. The primary HDU also contains a VOTable representation of the metadata.

colfits-basic

FITS file containing a BINTABLE with a single row; each cell of the row contains a whole column's worth of data. The primary HDU contains nothing.

votable-tabledata

VOTable document with TABLEDATA (pure XML) encoding

votable-binary-inline

VOTable document with BINARY-encoded data inline within a STREAM element.

votable-binary-href

VOTable document with BINARY-encoded data in a separate file (only if not writing to a stream).

votable-binary2-inline

VOTable document with BINARY2-encoded data inline within a STREAM element. This option is only available if VOTable output version is VOTable 1.3 or later. VOTable 1.4 is the default; see the votable.version system property.

votable-binary2-href

VOTable document with BINARY-encoded data in a separate file (only if not writing to a stream). This option is only available if VOTable output version is VOTable 1.3 or later. VOTable 1.4 is the default; see the votable.version system property.

votable-fits-href

VOTable document with FITS-encoded data in a separate file (only if not writing to a stream)

votable-fits-inline

VOTable document with FITS-encoded data inline within a STREAM element

ascii

Simple space-separated ASCII file format

text

Human-readable plain text (with headers and column boundaries marked out)

csv

Comma-Separated Value format. The first line is a header which contains the column names.

csv-noheader

Comma-Separated Value format with no header line.

ipac

IPAC Table Format.

tst

Tab-Separated Table format.

html

Standalone HTML document containing a TABLE element

html-element

HTML TABLE element

latex

LaTeX tabular environment

latex-document

LaTeX standalone document containing a tabular environment

mirage

Mirage input format

In some cases the tools may guess what output format you want by looking at the extension of the output filename you have specified.