So this week, we have started looking at another module SIMBAD. Of course there is only preliminary discussion/ review yet but the code skeleton is available in this PR.
One issue I am working on goes like this - What we would like to do is display an HTML table (this one) to the user - to let her decide the VOTable fields to set. The first step is to scrape the table using BeautifulSoup(bs4). Next we'll be storing the results as JSON - again with python this is as simple as a couple of lines of code. What I am looking at is a great way to then display the data interactively in python/ipython.
The obvious way to do this would be to use something like a table. Good News - Astropy already has this functionality and it is *truly fully loaded*. With astropy.table.Table - you can scroll the rows (replicate the unix more) and in an IPython NB, the table is displayed as an HTML table and looks very impressive. I spent quite a few hours poring over the source code and I was really inspired :)!
Well then I tried my hand at adding rows/columns and creating a table from the HTML I had scrapped and I came across a funny unicode error. This was just a false alarm :) - since an astropy table uses a numpy array underneath - in a numpy array if you need to enter a string of variable length you should also mention a datatype for it otherwise it tries to parse this by its default datatype and then errors ensue! (This then lead to a tour of numpy datatypes which in turn lead to an enjoyable diversion to the Scipy-2013 web page - and I spent a few minutes(?) looking excitedly at the plans - Astropy is presenting there(and its at UT-Austin too!) ) Well so what is needed is dtypes=['object'] for a variable length string. Well but there are some points to be smoothed out yet - which is one of the things I am looking at.
P.S. The code I include via a gist doesn't appear in the Feeder (this post doesn't have any but the June-16th one did) - looking into this.
One issue I am working on goes like this - What we would like to do is display an HTML table (this one) to the user - to let her decide the VOTable fields to set. The first step is to scrape the table using BeautifulSoup(bs4). Next we'll be storing the results as JSON - again with python this is as simple as a couple of lines of code. What I am looking at is a great way to then display the data interactively in python/ipython.
The obvious way to do this would be to use something like a table. Good News - Astropy already has this functionality and it is *truly fully loaded*. With astropy.table.Table - you can scroll the rows (replicate the unix more) and in an IPython NB, the table is displayed as an HTML table and looks very impressive. I spent quite a few hours poring over the source code and I was really inspired :)!
Well then I tried my hand at adding rows/columns and creating a table from the HTML I had scrapped and I came across a funny unicode error. This was just a false alarm :) - since an astropy table uses a numpy array underneath - in a numpy array if you need to enter a string of variable length you should also mention a datatype for it otherwise it tries to parse this by its default datatype and then errors ensue! (This then lead to a tour of numpy datatypes which in turn lead to an enjoyable diversion to the Scipy-2013 web page - and I spent a few minutes(?) looking excitedly at the plans - Astropy is presenting there(and its at UT-Austin too!) ) Well so what is needed is dtypes=['object'] for a variable length string. Well but there are some points to be smoothed out yet - which is one of the things I am looking at.
P.S. The code I include via a gist doesn't appear in the Feeder (this post doesn't have any but the June-16th one did) - looking into this.
Are you embedding the gist into the blog post or just linking?
ReplyDeleteI am embedding the gist in the post.
Delete