5.7 ASCII and Binary Table Routines

These routines perform read and write operations on columns of data in FITS ASCII or Binary tables. Note that in the following discussions, the first row and column in a table is at position 1 not 0.

Users should also read the following chapter on the CFITSIO iterator function which provides a more `object oriented' method of reading and writing table columns. The iterator function is a little more complicated to use, but the advantages are that it usually takes less code to perform the same operation, and the resulting program often runs faster because the FITS files are read and written using the most efficient block size.