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NAME

       dtfits - display FITS table

SYNOPSIS

       dtfits <table>

DESCRIPTION

       dtfits  dumps  the  contents of a FITS table in an ASCII format, 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. 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

       -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 preferrable 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 characters
              being interpreted by the shell, it  is  recommended  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 several tables  in
       a file, they will all be displayed one after another in the same output
       stream.

                                  22 Dec 1999                        dtfits(1)