read

astropy.io.ascii.read(table, guess=None, **kwargs)

Read the input table and return the table. Most of the default behavior for various parameters is determined by the Reader class.

See also:

• https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/io/ascii/

• https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/io/ascii/read.html

Parameters:

tablepython:str, python:file-like object, python:list, pathlib.Path object

Input table as a file name, file-like object, list of string[s], single newline-separated string or pathlib.Path object.

guessbool

Try to guess the table format. Defaults to None.

formatpython:str, BaseReader

Input table format

InputterBaseInputter

Inputter class

OutputterBaseOutputter

Outputter class

delimiterpython:str

Column delimiter string

commentpython:str

Regular expression defining a comment line in table

quotecharpython:str

One-character string to quote fields containing special characters

header_startpython:int

Line index for the header line not counting comment or blank lines. A line with only whitespace is considered blank.

data_startpython:int

Line index for the start of data not counting comment or blank lines. A line with only whitespace is considered blank.

data_endpython:int

Line index for the end of data not counting comment or blank lines. This value can be negative to count from the end.

converterspython:dict

Dictionary of converters to specify output column dtypes. Each key in the dictionary is a column name or else a name matching pattern including wildcards. The value is either a data type such as int or np.float32; a list of such types which is tried in order until a successful conversion is achieved; or a list of converter tuples (see the convert_numpy function for details).

data_SplitterBaseSplitter

Splitter class to split data columns

header_SplitterBaseSplitter

Splitter class to split header columns

namespython:list

List of names corresponding to each data column

include_namespython:list

List of names to include in output.

exclude_namespython:list

List of names to exclude from output (applied after include_names)

fill_valuespython:tuple, python:list of python:tuple

specification of fill values for bad or missing table values

fill_include_namespython:list

List of names to include in fill_values.

fill_exclude_namespython:list

List of names to exclude from fill_values (applied after fill_include_names)

fast_readerbool, python:str or python:dict

Whether to use the C engine, can also be a dict with options which defaults to False; parameters for options dict:

use_fast_converter: bool

enable faster but slightly imprecise floating point conversion method

parallel: bool or int

multiprocessing conversion using cpu_count() or 'number' processes

exponent_style: str

One-character string defining the exponent or 'Fortran' to auto-detect Fortran-style scientific notation like '3.14159D+00' ('E', 'D', 'Q'), all case-insensitive; default 'E', all other imply use_fast_converter

chunk_sizeint

If supplied with a value > 0 then read the table in chunks of approximately chunk_size bytes. Default is reading table in one pass.

chunk_generatorbool

If True and chunk_size > 0 then return an iterator that returns a table for each chunk. The default is to return a single stacked table for all the chunks.

encodingpython:str

Allow to specify encoding to read the file (default= None).

Returns:

datTable or <generator>

Output table