.TH dtfits 1 "22 Dec 1999"
.SH NAME
dtfits \- display FITS table
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B dtfits
.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
.B 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.
.PP
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.
.PP
Notice that
.B dtfits
only accepts one single FITS table in input.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.BI \-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.
.TP
.BI \-s " "
Use the character 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:
.br
dtfits \-s '&' table.tfits
.PP
If you want to use a special character as separator, such as a tab,
use ^V to insert your character, such as:
.br
dtfits \-s '^V' table.tfits
.PP
which means: you type CTRL-V and then the tab key.
.SH SEE ALSO
.PP
.B dfits
.SH FILES
.PP
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.