I/O Registry (astropy.io.registry
)¶
Note
The I/O registry is only meant to be used directly by users who want
to define their own custom readers/writers. Users who want to find
out more about what built-in formats are supported by
Table
by default should see
Unified file read/write interface. No built-in formats are currently defined for
NDData
, but this will be added in
future).
Introduction¶
The I/O registry is a sub-module used to define the readers/writers available
for the Table
and
NDData
classes.
Using astropy.io.registry
¶
The following example demonstrates how to create a reader for the
Table
class. First, we can create a highly
simplistic FITS reader which just reads the data as a structured array:
from astropy.table import Table
def fits_table_reader(filename, hdu=1):
from astropy.io import fits
data = fits.open(filename)[hdu].data
return Table(data)
and then register it:
from astropy.io import registry
registry.register_reader('fits', Table, fits_table_reader)
Reader functions can take any arguments except format
(since this
is reserved for read()
) and should return an instance of the class specified as the second argument of register_reader
(Table
in the above case.)
We can then read in a FITS table with:
t = Table.read('catalog.fits', format='fits')
In practice, it would be nice to have the read
method automatically
identify that this file was a FITS file, so we can construct a function that
can recognize FITS files, which we refer to here as an identifier function.
An identifier function should take a first argument that should be a string
which indicates whether the identifier is being called from read
or
write
, and should then accept arbitrary number of positional and keyword
arguments via *args
and **kwargs
, which are the arguments passed to
Table.read
. We can write a simplistic function that only looks at
filenames (but in practice, this function could even look at the first few
bytes of the file for example). The only requirement is that it return a
boolean indicating whether the input matches that expected for the format:
def fits_identify(origin, *args, **kwargs):
return isinstance(args[0], basestring) and \
args[0].lower().split('.')[-1] in ['fits', 'fit']
Note
Identifier functions should be prepared for arbitrary input - in particular, the first argument may not be a filename or file object, so it should not assume that this is the case.
We then register this identifier function:
registry.register_identifier('fits', Table, fits_identify)
And we can then do:
t = Table.read('catalog.fits')
If multiple formats match the current input, then an exception is
raised, and similarly if no format matches the current input. In that
case, the format should be explicitly given with the format=
keyword argument.
Similarly, it is possible to create custom writers. To go with our simplistic FITS reader above, we can write a simplistic FITS writer:
def fits_table_writer(table, filename, clobber=False):
import numpy as np
from astropy.io import fits
fits.writeto(filename, np.array(table), clobber=clobber)
We then register the writer:
io_registry.register_writer('fits', Table, fits_table_writer)
And we can then write the file out to a FITS file:
t.write('catalog_new.fits', format='fits')
If we have registered the identifier as above, we can simply do:
t.write('catalog_new.fits')
Reference/API¶
astropy.io.registry Module¶
Functions¶
register_reader (data_format, data_class, ...) |
Register a reader function. |
register_writer (data_format, data_class, ...) |
Register a table writer function. |
register_identifier (data_format, data_class, ...) |
Associate an identifier function with a specific data type. |
identify_format (origin, data_class_required, ...) |
|
get_reader (data_format, data_class) |
|
get_writer (data_format, data_class) |
|
read (cls, *args, **kwargs) |
Read in data |
write (data, *args, **kwargs) |
Write out data |
get_formats ([data_class]) |
Get the list of registered I/O formats as a Table. |