Atpy

New Features
~~~~~~~~~~~~

- specify whether to used masked arrays by default via an .atpyrc file
and/or via a set_masked_default function.

- added support for the asciitable module, which opens up support to read
in arbitrary ASCII tables. Formats supported by default include CDS
format (aka Machine Readable Tables), RDB, and DAOphot tables. In
addition, the full asciitable API is available.

- added support for reading/writing Table and TableSet to HDF5 files. This
includes appending to existing files, and reading from/writing to
groups.

- improved output when doing 'print table' where table is a Table
instance.

- added support for Python 3

API/Internal changes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- significant speedup for reading large FITS tables

- table columns can now be accessed using the item notation, t['column']

- table can now be accessed by name in table sets, via ts['table_name']

Bug fixes
~~~~~~~~~

- fixed a bug that prevented ASCII FITS tables from being read in

- fixed a bug that meant that only the first table in a list was used when
creating a TableSet from a list of Tables.

- fixed copy() method for Table

- fixed several other minor bugs

Restores compatibility with Python 2.5

The main change in this version is that internal data storage is now done
using NumPy structured arrays (and optionally NumPy masked structured
arrays). We have worked on preventing precision loss and improving
conservation of column types when reading/writing to files/databases.
Finally, we have re-vamped the documentation.

New Features
~~~~~~~~~~~~

- tables are now stored as structured arrays

- new masked= argument during Table initialization (default is False).
Allows masked arrays to be used. To use this feature, it is preferable
to be using a recent svn NumPy version.

- full SQL queries for MySQL, PostGreSQL, and SQLite

- access column information through Table.columns, indexed either by
column name or number. Supports iteration.

- verbose argument for read/write

- new Table.rows() method to select specific rows

- new Table.add_empty_column() method

- new Table.append() method to combine two tables

- new Table.sort() method

- added comments/keywords for TableSet() class as a whole

- new before=/after=/position= arguments for Table.add_column() and
Table.add_empty_column()

- new smart_typing= argument for IPAC tables (see docstring)

- raise Exception if SQL query returns no results

- basic support for primary keys

- added 'overwrite' argument for all types

API/Internal changes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- fits_read, vo_read, ipac_read, sql_read, and equivalent methods are now
depracated - use read(...) instead and specify type= if necessary.

- Table.units, Table.types, Table.nulls, and Table.formats are deprecated.
Use Table.columns instead.

- Read/Write methods are now 'registered' with ATpy, rather than being
inherited by the Table class. This allows users to write their own
readers/writers and register them with atpy.register_reader,
atpy.register_writer, atpy.register_set_reader, and
atpy.register_set_writer

- Allow users to specify new extensions to associate with different table
types via atpy.register_extensions

Bug fixes
~~~~~~~~~

- fixed a bug that meant that values could not be assigned when accessing
a column via attributes (e.g. t.column_name[1] = 1)

- fixed a bug with creating empty table sets

- fixed a bug with pedantic= option for VO tables

- fixed a bug that prevented lists from being passed to add_column

- fixed float precision for IPAC and VO tables

- better handling of the different integer types (unsigned/signed 8, 16,
32, 64-bit) for VO tables, FITS tbales, and SQL databases

- fixed bug when writing strings to FITS files

- fixed issues when reading strings from SQL databases

- new unittest.py

The main changes with this update are the removal of the pkg_ressources
module dependency (which caused problems for a number of users) and a
number of bug fixes.

New Features
~~~~~~~~~~~~

- removed pkg_ressources dependency. Versions are now checked using
distutils, which is more standard

- added support for boolean columns in FITS and VO tables

API changes
~~~~~~~~~~~

- added dtype= argument to Table.add_column to force conversion to a
given type on the fly

- added pendatic= argument for VO Table

- tables in SQL databases are now referred to by name instead of tid

Bug fixes
~~~~~~~~~

- fixed an issue which occurred with string columns in VO tables on
MacOS X with Python 2.6 64-bit

- fixed a bug which prevented the where() method to work correctly

- improved handling of null values

- allow non-standard 'long' datatype for IPAC tables

- fixed bug with remove_column

- improved handling of SQL tables

- fixed bug with IPAC table output

- fixed several other minor bugs

First public beta release