National Aeronautics and Space Administration

flc2ascii is a Perl script


This script dumps a FITS lightcurve or a XRONOS output file into ASCII
and adds header information suitable for QDP/PLT. The output ASCII file
contains: (1) the QDP/PLT command 'READ SERR', followed by numbers
indicating the vectors which have errors, (2) the FITS header and GTI
extension (if present in the input file) with an '!' prepended to each
line, and (3) columns of data representing the X-axis and Y-axis (plus
additional error columns and a fractional exposure column, if selected
from the input file). The script recognizes two possible formats for the
FITS lightcurve or XRONOS output: data stored (a) as a single element or
(b) as an array of elements in column (Note only one dimension e.g.
TDIMn= '(j)'). For the format (a), all the rows in the table for a given
column are moved into the ASCII file, for (b), only one row (array type)
is dumped into an ASCII file. The script creates an X-axis if not present
in the FITS lightcurve or XRONOS output. For the format (b) the X-axis
is derived using the auxiliary coordinates column keywords (e.g. 1CTYPn,
1CVALn, 1CDLTn with n column number). Only if the X-axis is TIME for the
format (a), the X column in the ASCII file is derived from the timing
header keyword TIMEDEL.


  -h                See this message.

  -i infile[ext]    Name of the input file.  Extension may be specified with
                    + or []. Default extension is 1.

  -o outfile        Output file name.

  -q                Spawn QDP on output file when finished.

  -r #              For a "one interval per row" type input file, specifies
                    which  row number.

  -x column[,error] Column name for the X axis and (optional) X error column.
                    (For no X column enter 0).

  -y column[,error] Column name for the Y axis and (optional) Y error column.

  -f column         Column name for the fractional exposure (0 for none).