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:

tablestr, file-like object, 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.

formatstr, BaseReader

Input table format

inputter_clsBaseInputter

Inputter class

outputter_clsBaseOutputter

Outputter class

delimiterstr

Column delimiter string

commentstr

Regular expression defining a comment line in table

quotecharstr

One-character string to quote fields containing special characters

header_startint

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

data_startint

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

data_endint

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

convertersdict

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_splitter_clsBaseSplitter

Splitter class to split data columns

header_splitter_clsBaseSplitter

Splitter class to split header columns

nameslist

List of names corresponding to each data column

include_nameslist

List of names to include in output.

exclude_nameslist

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

fill_valuestuple, list of tuple

specification of fill values for bad or missing table values

fill_include_nameslist

List of names to include in fill_values.

fill_exclude_nameslist

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

fast_readerbool, str 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_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.

encodingstr

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

Returns:

datTable or <generator>

Output table