[AstroPy] Adding a column to a FITS binary HDU

[Alberto]

Worked like a charm. Thank you very much!

Alberto

On 16/01/21 19:04, E. Madison Bray wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 5:55 PM Alberto <alberto.manfreda at pi.infn.it> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> despite I have been using astropy.io for a few years now, this is my first message to the list (which speaks highly of the quality of the module and of the documentation - great job, really!). Recently, however, I found myself stuck doing an apparently simple task. I have a FITS file containing a bunch of binary HDU tables, which I open with the:
>>
>> hdu_list = open_event_file('file_path')
>>
>> command. I need to add a new column to one of the HDU tables, then write the entire hdu_list to a different file location.
>>
>> What is the simplest way to do this? The methods for adding columns that I found in the online FAQs work for Table objects, but what I can get from my hdu_list is a BinTableHDU object, which doesn't support dictionary-like assignment or the add_column() method. I know I can get a Table object from the hdu_list like this:
>>
>> table = Table(hdu_list[1].data)
>>
>> but this is a copy, so the changes to the table does not apply to the original hdu_list.
>>
>> Any help is appreciated.
> Hi Alberto,
>
> The `data` arrays accessible on the HDU objects are basically Numpy
> structured arrays, so techniques and utilities for adding a column to
> a structured array apply here, though unfortunately it's not as easy
> as one would like.  Fortunately, newer versions of Numpy have added a
> few utility functions for this; in this case in particular
> numpy.lib.recfunctions.append_fields:
> https://numpy.org/doc/stable/user/basics.rec.html#numpy.lib.recfunctions.append_fields
>
> So you should be able to add a column like:
>
>>>> from numpy.lib.recfunctions import append_fields
>>>> hdu = hdu_list[1]
>>>> hdu.data = append_fields(hdu.data, 'NAME_OF_COLUMN', column_data, usemask=False)
> I tested that this works (it's a bit annoying that it returns a masked
> array by default so you need to give usemask=False) for this to work.
>
> In principle you should also be able to use Table.add_column with the
> Table class as you mentioned.  Then you can do:
>
>>>> hdul_list[1].data = table.as_array()
> Unfortunately this has a bug related to string columns that I just
> discovered in testing this.
>
> I'm sorry that even now this is not as easy to do as it should be.
> For the most part the Table class has obviated the need for anything
> like this in the "lower-level" interface, but I agree it's not obvious
> how to do if you want to manipulate existing FITS files.
>
> Madison
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