read

astropy.io.ascii.read(table, guess=None, **kwargs)[source] [edit on github]

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

See also:

Parameters:
table : str, file-like, list, pathlib.Path object

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

guess : bool

Try to guess the table format. Defaults to None.

format : str, BaseReader

Input table format

Inputter : BaseInputter

Inputter class

Outputter : BaseOutputter

Outputter class

delimiter : str

Column delimiter string

comment : str

Regular expression defining a comment line in table

quotechar : str

One-character string to quote fields containing special characters

header_start : int

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

data_start : int

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

data_end : int

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

converters : dict

Dictionary of converters

data_Splitter : BaseSplitter

Splitter class to split data columns

header_Splitter : BaseSplitter

Splitter class to split header columns

names : list

List of names corresponding to each data column

include_names : list

List of names to include in output.

exclude_names : list

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

fill_values : dict

specification of fill values for bad or missing table values

fill_include_names : list

List of names to include in fill_values.

fill_exclude_names : list

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

fast_reader : bool or 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_size : int

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_generator : bool

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.

Reader : BaseReader

Reader class (DEPRECATED)

encoding: str

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

Returns:
dat : Table OR <generator>

Output table