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Read (and write) Notes from Machine-Readable Tables (MRT) in ascii.io #16787
Description
What is the problem this feature will solve?
Currently, when reading MRT tables, the Notes section seems to be ignored. It would be nice to make it accessible, even only as a string, so that users can interact with Notes without re-reading the table.
Writing is probably more complex, but would also be nice.
Describe the desired outcome
The desired outcome would be for MRT table notes to be accessible through the table object, either as formatted metadata or as a single string.
Additional context
Some work on this seems to have been done in PR #12039.
I also saw this briefly mentioned in another issue about MRT tables.
If no one is currently working or was planning to work on this, I'd be interested to contribute, but I would have two questions:
- Is there interest for this feature?
- Is MRT metadata input and subsequent writing [GSoC21c] #12039 a good place to start?
Cc-ing @Suyog7130 and @hamogu re PR #12039.
Activity
hamogu commentedon Jul 31, 2024
Hi @vandalt ! This is absolutely a feature we'd like to have and thanks for offering to work on this! That's why a student worked on it in summer 2021. Unfortunately, he didn't manage to finish it before his GoogleSummerOfCode was over, so the PR was never finished and eventually closed. I think looking back at that PR and the discussion there is a good start - however keep in mind that the PR was not finished and the implementation started that might not be the best possible (if it was, the PR would have been merged!).
I'm looking forward to hear from you in a PR or in discussion in this issue.
dhomeier commentedon Aug 22, 2024
As a start, would the functionality tested in
https://github.com/Suyog7130/astropy/blob/b985efc9cad13073e7f173567480b6d3567f1530/astropy/io/ascii/tests/test_cds.py#L23
ff. address some or all of your needs?
vandalt commentedon Oct 27, 2024
I had some time to look into this recently. Some notes:
metaattribute of the table, with entries forTitle,AuthorandTablepointing to their respective values, and anotesentry pointing to a list of notes.MrtHeader.update_meta()seems like the best place to implement this, so I will start with that in a draft PR (hopefully later today or in the next week).