author: Tom Aldcroft
date-created: 2014 April 12
date-last-revised: 2021 May 25
date-accepted: 2015 January 26
type: Standard Track
status: Accepted
revised-by: Tom Aldcroft, Mark Taylor - 2021 May 02 - Added subtype keyword and extended data types
Data tables in astronomical analysis frequently contain additional metadata beyond just the column names and data values. Common attributes include the numerical data type, the physical unit, and a longer textual description of the column content. These attributes can be represented in binary formats such as FITS, but the available options for a text-only format are inadequate.
APE6 proposes to fill this void by specification of a standard for the interchange of tabular data in a text-only format. The format handles the key issue of serializing column specifications and table metadata by using a YAML-encoded data structure. The actual tabular data are stored in a standard character separated values (CSV) format, giving compatibility with a wide variety of non-specialized CSV table readers.
Using YAML makes it extremely easy for applications and humans to read both the standardized data format elements (e.g. column name, type, description) as well as complex metadata structures. YAML also lends itself to simple table modifications by humans in a plain text editor.
The reference Python implementation in astropy.io.ascii is relatively straightforward and will provide a significant benefit of allowing text serialization of most astropy Table objects, persistent storage, and subsequent interchange with other users.
Although developed in the context of Astropy, there is nothing astronomy-specific in this format and it could be useful for other domains or languages. However, promoting that is beyond the scope of this APE.
Following the lead of the astronomical data community in recently documenting shortcomings of the FITS standard, we start by discussing existing widely-used standards and why they are lacking.
The Comma-Separated-Values format is probably the most common text-based method for representing data tables. The proposed standard in APE6 leverages this universality by using this format for serializing the actual data values.
As noted in the Wikipedia article, CSV is not a rigid standard despite some efforts in that direction. Even the name "comma-separated" is misleading since tab-separated or whitespace-separated tabular data generally fall in this category. Nevertheless nearly everyone with a computer has access to robust tools that can read and write CSV format tables, and CSV is a de-facto standard for importing and exporting tabular data to applications, including most spreadsheet applications like Excel.
For science applications, pure CSV has a serious shortcoming in the complete lack of support for table metadata. This is frequently not a showstopper but represents a serious limitation which has motivated alternate standards in the astronomical community.
The Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg developed a Standard for Documentation of Astronomical Catalogues which is very widely used. The Astrophysical Journal has adopted this standard for formatting machine readable tables associated with journal articles. The format is alternately referred to as the CDS or Machine Readable Table (MRT) format.
The CDS format has reasonable support for basic table and column metadata, including column types, null values, range checking, units, and labels. From its heritage as a catalog descriptor format, it includes table metadata like ADC_Keywords, Literature Reference, table description, authors, notes, and comments. Within that context it provides a well-documented standard.
However, the CDS format does not include support for keyword values like FITS, nor arbitrary table metadata. This limits the fidelity of serialization for tables that have rich metadata (e.g. WCS).
As a tool for data interchange, CDS is far from ideal. Despite the name "Machine Readable Table", the format is quite difficult for machines to read. This stems from the format of the ReadMe file, which has a non-regular format that requires tricky regex parsing and logic to fully interpret.
A few options for reading MRT files are available, but none of them are full-featured. As far as we know the version in Astropy is the only one being currently maintained. It supports much of the standard with regards to the data values and column definitions, but makes no attempt to parse any of the other table metadata. Getting an MRT file directly into Excel is onerous.
We are unaware of any publicly available application that can write in the CDS / MRT format, and instead authors rely on data translation by online tools or data service providers.
The IPAC Table Format is the standard for the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive and is widely used.
This format is more in line with FITS in terms of providing support for arbitrary keyword / value pairs and comment lines, along with specification of column names, data types, units, and null values. The format is succinctly described in the standard page and is fairly straightforward to understand and implement.
IPAC has a shortcoming as a generic data interchange format because of the specific serialization of the column specification. Note that in the example below the comments are not part of the actual data file and are included for illustration purposes only:
\keyword = value # Keywords (optional)
\ Comment # Comments (optional)
| name1 | name2 | name3 | name4 | name5 | # Column Names (required)
| double | double | int | real | char | # Data Types (standard)
| unit | unit | unit | unit | unit | # Data Units (optional)
| null | null | null | null | null | # Null Values (optional)
165.466279 -34.704730 5 11.27 A string value # Data Rows (1 required)
160.1231 -4.7 3 2.3 value # Data Rows (1 required)In order to associate the columns names name1 .. name5 with the five data columns, the reader application has to have specific knowledge of the IPAC format. Clearly providing full support for specific typing, units and null-value handling requires a dedicated reader, but a significant fraction of data tables do not require these and can make due with just column names and automatic type inference. Supporting the common case of falling through to bare-bones CSV table support has value.
Another issue illustrated above is that IPAC uses fixed-width formatting for the data values, so that if a generic CSV reader tries to parse this file it will find an inconsistency in the number of data columns between rows 1 and 2 (because of the spaces in the name5 column values).
Supporting more complex metadata structures would be possible within the IPAC standard using keyword values, but it would be cumbersome and require inventing a custom serialization method to work within that confine.
VOTable is by design a fully-flexible data format that can handle all of the needs for text serialization of complex data structures, including tabular data sets. The issue in this context is in simplicity and data interchange with the broader community. In essence if someone wants to read or write a VOTable then they must use one of a small number of implementations of this protocol. It is not possible for someone to directly read such a table into Excel. Writing an implementation of VOTable in a new language (e.g. R, Julia, or Perl) to read/write VOTable is a major undertaking.
A smaller issue is speed, since the VOTable format requires relatively complex parsing and validation for text serialization.
We are not aware of other widely-used standards in the astronomical community for text representation of tabular data.
Though not widely used in the astronomical community, since initially drafting this APE we have become aware of a very similar standard known as the Tabular Data Package. This provides a fully-formed protocol for publishing and sharing tabular-style data which is conceptually very similar to the proposed ECSV format, with the exception of using two files, one pure JSON for the header and one pure CSV for the data. The JSON header follows a schema defined by the JSON Table Schema.
After evaluation and a brief discussion with that community, we find that the Tabular Data Package and associated standards would require a fair degree of modification to fully suit our needs. More crucially, the decision to rely on YAML instead of JSON for serialization precludes direct use of the TDP.
The proposed Enhanced CSV (ECSV) format has the following overall structure:
- A header section which consists of lines that start with the
#character and provide the table definition and data format via a YAML-encoded data structure. - An initial line in the header section which identifies the file as ECSV and provides a version number.
- A CSV-formatted data section in which the first line contains the column names and subsequent lines contains the data values.
Version 1.0 of the ECSV format specification and the reference Python implementation assumes ASCII-encoded header and data sections. Support for unicode (in particular UTF-8) may be added in subsequent versions.
The fundamental issue which the CDS and IPAC formats try to address is serializing the information which specifies the table column definitions and other relevant metadata. Those formats essentially invent custom serialization specifications that must be carefully implemented from scratch by any reader/writer application.
ECSV takes the approach of defining a minimal standard for the the underlying data structure that is needed to define a table. Then that structure is encoded or decoded using YAML. Libraries for encoding and decoding YAML are widely used, very efficient, and easily available in all the most-frequently used programming languages (with the notable exception of IDL).
Translating to / from the data structure provided by a ECSV header into the native structure that an application uses should generally be quite easy because the functional elements (e.g. column name, data type) are ubiquitous. Generally speaking manipulating data structures programmatically is easier than parsing textual data structure fields.
The ECSV standard does not require that the YAML encoding be "pretty", but it is highly-recommended that applications format the YAML header to be legible to humans. This is important because a key feature of YAML is that it is meant to be easily readable, and thus modifiable, by humans.
The highly readable nature of YAML is key driver for using this over JSON. In simple cases the column definitions serialize on a single line which makes for a compact and useful representation.
A couple of quick examples using the reference Python implementation will put this in context. First let's create a table and give it some custom attributes:
>>> from astropy.table import Table
>>> t = Table([[1, 4], [2, 3]], names=['a', 'b'])
>>> t['a'].unit = 'm/s'
>>> t['a'].format = '%03d'
>>> t['b'].description = 'This is column b'
>>> t['b'].unit = 'km'
>>> print(t)
a b
m / s km
----- ---
001 2
004 3Now we write this to a file using the ECSV format and print it:
>>> t.write('example.ecsv', format='ascii.ecsv')
>>> cat example.ecsv
# %ECSV 1.0
# ---
# datatype:
# - {name: a, unit: m / s, datatype: int64, format: '%03d'}
# - {name: b, unit: km, datatype: int64, description: This is column b}
a b
1 2
4 3We see that header starts with a header line and YAML block marker to identify the format and the beginning of the data block. After that comes the YAML data structure with column definitions. Finally the column names and data values are included in CSV format with a space delimiter.
Now we can read back the table and see that it has survived the round-trip to a text file:
>>> t2 = Table.read('example.ecsv', format='ascii.ecsv')
>>> print(t2)
a b
m / s km
----- ---
001 2
004 3To illustrate the full features of ECSV we create a table with meta data (keywords and comments) as well as more detailed column meta data:
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> import astropy.units as u
>>> t = Table([[1.0, 4.0], [2, 3]], names=['a', 'b'])
>>> t.meta['keywords'] = OrderedDict([('z_key1', 'val1'), ('a_key2', 'val2')])
>>> t.meta['comments'] = ['Comment 1', 'Comment 2', 'Comment 3']
>>> t['a'].unit = u.m / u.s
>>> t['a'].format = '%5.2f'
>>> t['a'].description = 'Column A'
>>> t['b'].meta = dict(column_meta={'a':1, 'b': 2})Now we write the table to standard out:
>>> import sys
>>> t.write(sys.stdout, format='ascii.ecsv')
# %ECSV 1.0
# ---
# datatype:
# - {name: a, unit: m / s, datatype: float64, format: '%5.2f', description: Column A}
# - name: b
# datatype: int64
# meta:
# column_meta: {a: 1, b: 2}
# meta: !!omap
# - keywords: !!omap
# - {z_key1: val1}
# - {a_key2: val2}
# - comments: [Comment 1, Comment 2, Comment 3]
# schema: astropy-2.0
a b
1.0 2
4.0 3In this case there are Ordered dictionary elements which must be preserved during serialization. This is done via the !!omap element tag. The reference Python implementation in Astropy uses custom Loader and Dumper classes to allow serialization to and from the Python OrderedDict class. Other implementations must likewise use an ordered mapping when reading and the !!omap tag when writing for ordered mappings in the data structure.
In addition, the reference Python implementation outputs the column attributes in the order 'name', 'unit', 'datatype', 'format', 'description', and 'meta'. This is not a ECSV requirement but is recommended for human accessibility.
An ECSV file begins with the the table header which contains the necessary information to define the table columns and metadata. This is expressed as a YAML-encoded data structure which has a small set of required keywords and standard specifiers.
Each line of the YAML-encoded data structure must start with the hash character # followed by a single space to indicate the presence of header content. All content within this header section must be parseable as a single YAML document. The first line which does not start with # signifies the end of the header and the start of the data section. Subsequent lines within the data section starting with # are to be ignored by the parser and not provided in the header output.
Within the header section, lines which start with ## are treated as comments and must be ignored by readers. ECSV writers shall not emit such comment data. Relevant comment strings should be serialized within the meta keyword structure.
Beyond the minimal standard, applications are free to create a custom data structure as needed using the top-level meta keyword. The specification of a corresponding schema keyword to allow interpretation and validation of the custom data is highly encouraged.
Standard keywords are:
datatype: list, requiredTop-level data type specification as a list of column specifiers.
delimiter: one-character string, optional, default=spaceDelimiter character used to separate the data fields. Allowed delimiter values are the single characters
spaceorcomma.meta: structure, optionalTable meta-data as an arbitrary data structure consisting purely of data types that can be encoded and decoded with the YAML "safe" dumper and loader, respectively. Typically the top level structure is a mapping (dict) or list. Keywords, comments, history and so forth should be part of
meta.schema: string, optionalThis provides a reference to a schema that can allow interpretation and validation of the
metavalues and column definitions. Further details of this keyword are TBD and expected in version 1.1 of the ECSV standard.
Each column specifier is a dictionary structure with the following keys:
name: string, requiredColumn name
datatype: string, requiredColumn data type. Allowed types are:
bool,int8,int16,int32,int64,uint8,uint16,uint32,uint64,float16,float32,float64,float128,complex64,complex128,complex256, andstring. Some implementations may not support all types.subtype: string, optionalThe
subtypekeyword describes an extended data type such as a variable-length array or an object column. See the section below on Subtype data for details. This is new in version 1.0 of the ECSV standard.unit: string, optionalData unit (unit system could be part of schema?).
format: string, optionalC-style formatting specification for outputting column values. This does not imply nor require that the values in this table are formatted accordingly.
description: string, optionalText description of column.
meta: structure, optionalColumn meta-data as an arbitrary data structure consisting purely of data types that can be encoded and decoded with the YAML "safe" dumper and loader, respectively.
The data section follows immediately after the header. Lines in the data section consisting only of zero or more whitespace characters (space and/or tab) are ignored.
The first non-blank line in the data section must contain the column names formatted according to the CSV writer being used. This allows most CSV reader applications to successfully read ECSV files and automatically infer the correct column names. ECSV readers should validate that the column names in this line match those in the header. A mismatch of the number of columns will be an error. If there is a name mismatch then it is recommended that the reader issue a warning, but implementations are free to be either less or more strict.
Following the column name line the data values are serialized according to the following rules:
- Each row must contain the same number of delimiter-separated fields.
- Fields are separated by the delimiter character, which can be either the space or comma character.
- Any field may be quoted with double quotes.
- Fields containing a line-break, double-quote, and/or the delimiter character must be quoted
- Boolean fields are represented as the case-sensitive string
FalseorTrue. - A double quote character in a field must be represented by two double quote characters.
Missing values in a data column are, by default, represented by a blank entry at the corresponding data location. For a comma-delimited file the following example shows the 3rd and 5th columns in this row as missing values:
1,2.0,,Hello,For a space-delimited file the corresponding row would be:
1 2.0 "" Hello ""With this convention it is not possible to have a zero-length string within a string column. Specialized schemas may choose to use a different convention for missing (or masked) data. For instance it is possible to write a masked column as two separate columns, one for the data and one for the mask. In this case the empty string no longer serves as a marker for missing values.
From version 1.0 and later it is possible to embed extended data types beyond simple typed scalars in the data section. The column data in the ECSV output shall be consistent with the specified datatype, with additional details of the data being captured in the subtype keyword.
If table readers do not recognise or support the subtype then they may ignore it and use the datatype only.
The ECSV standard defines three types of extended data that can be represented: multidimensional array data, variable-length array data, and object data. These correspond to specified subtype values described below. It is also allowed to define new custom subtype values for specific applications.
For multidimensional columns where each data cell is an array with consistent dimensions, the datatype is set to string and the subtype is set to the actual data type (one of the allowed values of the datatype keyword) followed by the JSON representation of the shape (dimensions) of each cell.
The contents of each cell are represented as a string using the JSON encoding of the array values. The encoding shall use row-major ordering with array shapes defined accordingly.
In the example below each cell is a 3 x 2 array of float64 type. The shape is [3,2] so the subtype is float64[3,2]:
# %ECSV 1.0
# ---
# datatype:
# - {name: array3x2, datatype: string, subtype: 'float64[3,2]'}
# schema: astropy-2.0
array3x2
[[0.0,1.0],[2.0,3.0],[4.0,5.0]]
[[6.0,7.0],[8.0,null],[10.0,11.0]]Missing values are indicated by the null marker, as seen in the second row.
For columns where the data cells are arrays which are consistent in all dimensions except for the final dimension, the datatype is set to string and the subtype is set to the actual data type (one of the allowed values of the datatype keyword specified previously) followed by the JSON representation of shape (dimensions) of the cells. Here the shape is set to the consistent dimensions plus a null dimension.
The contents of each cell are represented as a string using the JSON encoding of the array values. The encoding shall use row-major ordering with array shapes defined accordingly.
For example a column that has 3-d arrays in each cell with shapes of [4,4,2], [4,4,5] and [4,4,3], the subtype would be int64[4,4,null]. For a column that has 1-d int64 arrays having lengths of 2, 5, and 3 respectively the subtype would be int64[null].
An example for a 1-d variable-length array follows:
# %ECSV 1.0
# ---
# datatype:
# - {name: array_var, datatype: string, subtype: 'int64[null]'}
# schema: astropy-2.0
array_var
[1,2]
[3,4,5,null,7]
[8,9,10]Missing values are indicated by the null marker, as seen in the second row.
For object-type columns, the datatype is set to string and the subtype is set to json. Each object in the column is converted to a string representation using JSON encoding. This implies that the supported object types are those that can be represented in JSON, namely integer and float numbers, boolean, null, strings, arrays, and mappings.
As a point of clarification, "object" here refers to the common usage in the context of object-oriented programming. In the JSON standard, "object" refers to what we call a "mapping", for instance {"a":1, "b":2}.
The example below shows writing an object array to ECSV. Note that JSON requires a double-quote around strings, and ECSV requires "" to represent a double-quote within a string, hence the double-double quotes. :
# %ECSV 1.0
# ---
# datatype:
# - {name: objects, datatype: string, subtype: json}
# schema: astropy-2.0
objects
"{""a"":1}"
"{""b"":[2.5,null]}"
trueIn this subtype, the null marker is decoded by JSON as the language-specific representation of a null value. In Python this will be None.
PR# 2319: "Implement support for the ECSV format proposed in APE6"
PR# 683: Initial version "Support table metadata in io.ascii"
PR# 11569, 11662, 11720: "Support reading and writing multidimensional and object columns in ECSV"
The initial implementation is done in PR# 2319, which was based on PR# 683. PR# 11569 added support for extended data types (multidimensional and object columns) via a new subtype keyword.
This is a new feature and there are no issues with backward compatibility.
The 1.0 update adds a new subtype keyword. This is backward compatible with the previous 0.9 version since that keyword will simply be ignored by older readers that are only compliant with the 0.9 standard. In this case the extended data values will be returned as defined by the datatype keyword.
Alternative existing formats that support some degree of metadata have been discussed, but none provide the necessary framework for serialization and interchange of astropy Tables.
This APE was discussed in astropy-APEs PR 7, with calls for comment sent out to the astropy, astropy-dev, and apps@ivoa.net mailing lists. There was some concern that this proposal duplicates functionality that exists elsewhere (e.g., those discussed above), but the general consensus of the discussion participants was that this proposal provides a format with features that are sufficiently different from older options that it is worth implementing.
A number of good suggestions and ideas were incorporated from the discussion, particularly related to compatibility with the ASDF standard. All comments from interested parties were agreeably resolved. As a result, the coordination committee unanimously agreed to accept this APE on 2015 January 26.
A significant update wa made in astropy-APEs PR 68, adding support for extended data types. There was significant discussion in the PR but broad agreement with the change.