NOT a GZ question! Anyone know how to read files in HEASARC's tdat format?

• by JeanTate

  I have the IRAS Point Source Catalog, downloaded from this HEASARC website, as an unzipped ~64MB .tdat file (heasarc_iraspsc.tdat). This webpage describes the format (tdat? "Transportable Database Aggregate Table (TDAT) Format"), which is nice, but all I want is the data, plus some names for the columns. I could probably write Python code to read it (probably take me a day or two), but I thought I'd ask here, to see if anyone has already encountered this problem, and has a convenient solution.

  I have posted this in RGZ Talk, and will post it in the new Zooniverse Talk ...

  Posted July 30, 2015 9:41 PM

• by c_cld

  Hi Jean,
  You could in Excel open this file (unzipped) and convert it using the pipe(|) as delimiter.

  Hope this helps
  Cheers

  Posted July 31, 2015 8:34 AM

• by JeanTate in response to C_cld's comment.

  Thanks C_cld, this is a very helpful suggestion! 😃

  I'd first need to break it up into several pieces (at ~250k rows, it's too big for OO Calc - the spreadsheet I use), which I think I have an app for, and then convert it to a CSV by replacing 'pipe' with 'comma' (or something more common) as delimiter.

  Posted July 31, 2015 3:22 PM