Thursday, August 14, 2008

Reading ASCII Tables into AIPS?

I'm trying to write a script where I repeat some steps on lots of different objects, and therefore I want to read a list of coordinates into AIPS. I currently have an ASCII list of x and y values. Can i read it into AIPS as two arrays so that my script can access them? Or do I have to do something hideous like manually fill the arrays within my script?


2 comments:

amanda said...

I think you're going to have to hard code them into the script.

James said...

Have you tried using
ParselTongue
? This is a Python interface to AIPS. If you're familiar with Python, then this makes scripting a whole bunch easier than writing runfiles. It can't do everything, but if what you want to do involves bona fide AIPS tasks, then you might want to check it out.

For instance, you could read the ascii file into python arrays, and use those as inputs to the tasks, which you can then run multiple times in a Python for loop.