astropy.io.fits.column:_AsciiColumnFormat

Extended Summary

The formats of ASCII table columns and binary table columns are inherently incompatible in FITS. They don't support the same ranges and types of values, and even reuse format codes in subtly different ways. For example the format code 'Iw' in ASCII columns refers to any integer whose string representation is at most w characters wide, so 'I' can represent effectively any integer that will fit in a FITS columns. Whereas for binary tables 'I' very explicitly refers to a 16-bit signed integer.

Conversions between the two column formats can be performed using the to/from_binary methods on this class, or the to/from_ascii methods on the _ColumnFormat class. But again, not all conversions are possible and may result in a ValueError.