vizier.js

Fetch data tables from VizieR in the browser

Overview

This small javascript package allows you to fetch a table from VizieR asynchronously and process the data table into a dictionary according to the ReadMe.

Author

Jo Bovy (University of Toronto): bovy - at - astro - dot - utoronto - dot - ca

Usage

Only very basic usage is currently implemented. See examples/basic.html for a fully worked basic example. An example of loading a single file that contains both the ReadMe and the data and that is not on the CDS servers is given in examples/onefile.html.

Load the library, e.g., from jsDelivr using

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@jobovy/vizier"></script>

for the latest version or specify the version with (update 1.0.2 to later versions as necessary)

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@jobovy/[email protected]"></script>

This exposes a global variable VizieR that contains the functionality of this package.

Fetch a table by specifying the catalog's name (e.g., 'J/A+A/545/A32'), the specific table within the catalog's name (e.g., 'table4.dat'), and the name of the ReadMe (optional, e.g., 'ReadMe'). This returns a Promise that returns the data dictionary and the header, which you can then process with a then function. For example,

VizieR.fetch('J/A+A/545/A32','table4.dat','ReadMe')
   .then(function (dataAndHeader) {
     let [data,header]= dataAndHeader;
     // do stuff with the data and/or the header!
   });

You can also fetch a table from a general URL, in that case just set the first argument to null. For example,

VizieR.fetch(null,'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jobovy/sparc-rotation-curves/main/data/MassModels_Lelli2016c.mrt')
   .then(function (dataAndHeader) {
     let [data,header]= dataAndHeader;
     // do stuff with the data and/or the header!
   });

Publishing a new version of this package

Follow the following steps:

• Update the version in package.json and then run npm install. Commit updated version in package.json and package-lock.json
• Create a new git tag for this version: git tag vX.X.X
• Package up for npm: npm pack, check that no extraneous files are included
• Publish to npm: npm publish --access public
• Done!