Reading VOTables

It should be possible to read any table which conforms to the VOTable 1.0 specification. This includes tables in which the cell data is included in-line as XML elements (TABLEDATA format), or included/referenced as a FITS table (FITS format) or included/referenced as a raw binary stream (BINARY format). Note however that the last of these has not been tested, so there may be problems.

TOPCAT can display one TABLE element within a VOTable document per viewer window. VOTable documents may be of varying complexity however, and can contain an arbitrary number of TABLE elements. Unless told otherwise, TOPCAT will display the first table it finds in the document (in a breadth-first search of the hierarchical structure); so in the (common) case that the document holds exactly one table, giving the filename will display that sole table. To display a table other than the first, you must indicate the zero-based index of the TABLE element in a breadth-first search after a '#' character at the end of the table specification.

Here is an example VOTable document:

   <VOTABLE>
     <RESOURCE>
       <TABLE name="Star Catalogue"> ... </TABLE>
       <TABLE name="Galaxy Catalogue"> ... </TABLE>
     </RESOURCE>
   </VOTABLE>

Compressed VOTable documents, or ones referred to as URLs, may be used.