In this chapter, we’ll describe some of the miscellaneous features of PyFITS.
PyFITS uses the Python warnings module to issue warning messages. The user can suppress the warnings using the python command line argument -W"ignore" when starting an interactive python session. For example:
python -W"ignore"
The user may also use the command line argument when running a python script as follows:
python -W"ignore" myscript.py
It is also possible to suppress warnings from within a python script. For instance, the warnings issued from a single call to the writeto convenience function may be suppressed from within a python script as follows:
import warnings
import pyfits
# ...
warnings.resetwarnings()
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore', category=UserWarning, append=True)
pyfits.writeto(file, im, clobber=True)
warnings.resetwarnings()
warnings.filterwarnings('always', category=UserWarning, append=True)
# ...
PyFITS also issues warnings when deprecated API features are used. In Python 2.7 and up deprecation warnings are ignored by default. To run Python with deprecation warnings enabled, either start Python with the -Wall argument, or you can enable deprecation warnings specifically with -Wd.
In Python versions below 2.7, if you wish to squelch deprecation warnings, you can start Python with -Wi::Deprecation. This sets all deprecation warnings to ignored. See http://docs.python.org/using/cmdline.html#cmdoption-unittest-discover-W for more information on the -W argument.
The pyfits.diff module contains several facilities for generating and reporting the differences between two FITS files, or two components of a FITS file.
The FITSDiff class can be used to generate and represent the differences between either two FITS files on disk, or two existing HDUList objects (or some combination thereof).
Likewise, the HeaderDiff class can be used to find the differences just between two Header objects. Other available differs include HDUDiff, ImageDataDiff, TableDataDiff, and RawDataDiff.
Each of these classes are instantiated with two instances of the objects that they diff. The returned diff instance has a number of attributes starting with .diff_ that describe differences between the two objects. See the API documentation for details on the different differ classes.