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Low-Level Table Access Subroutines

The following subroutines provide low-level access to the data in ASCII or binary tables and are mainly useful as an efficient way to copy all or part of a table from one FITS file to another. These routines simply read or write the specified number of consecutive bytes in an ASCII or binary table, without regard for column boundaries or the row length in the table. The first two subroutines read or write consecutive ASCII characters in a table to or from a character string variable, while the last two subroutines read or write consecutive bytes to or from a variable declared as a numeric data type (e.g., INTEGER, INTEGER*2, REAL, DOUBLE PRECISION). These routines do not perform any machine dependent data conversion or byte swapping, except that conversion to/from ASCII format is performed by the FTGTBS and FTPTBS routines on machines which do not use ASCII character codes in the internal data representations (e.g., on IBM mainframe computers).

1

Read a consecutive string of ASCII characters from an ASCII or binary table into a character variable (spanning columns and multiple rows if necessary)

FTGTBS(unit,frow,startchar,nchars, > string,status)

2

Write a consecutive string of characters to an ASCII or binary table from a character variable (spanning columns and multiple rows if necessary)

FTPTBS(unit,frow,startchar,nchars,string, > status)

3

Read a consecutive string of bytes from an ASCII or binary table into a numeric variable (spanning columns and multiple rows if necessary)

FTGTBB(unit,frow,startchar,nchars, > array,status)

4

Write a consecutive string of bytes to an ASCII or binary table from a numeric variable (spanning columns and multiple rows if necessary)

FTPTBB(unit,frow,startchar,nchars,array, > status)