Data retrieval from the FRBSTATS Catalogue

[0xCoto]

The FRBSTATS Catalogue is the most accurate and complete catalogue of fast radio bursts published to date, and it is continuously maintained. It would be nice to see the frbcat package support the quick retrieval of data from the FRBSTATS Catalogue as well.

The database can be downloaded as a CSV or JSON-formatted file (whichever is more convenient to handle).

[davidgardenier]

Thanks for raising this! I'm going to throw this over the fence towards @loostrum. For him: you might want to read the README of the FRBSTATS page, which explains in slightly more detail the difference between TNS & FRBSTATS.

[loostrum]

It would definitely be nice to support FRBSTATS in frbcat. We would certainly welcome a PR, but unfortunately don't have time to add it to frbcat ourselves at this point.

frbcat's TNS interface does solve some of the accessibility problems the TNS has: It removes some unnecessary columns and does have e.g. fluence and S/N because those as those are exposed through the TNS API.

[astrogewgaw]

@davidgardenier, @loostrum and @0xCoto: I am willing to work on FRBSTATS support for frbcat. However, before I support a PR, I just wanted to know what are the Python versions that frbcat aims to support? I usually write code that supports Python version 3.6 and above for my own packages 😅 , so if I have to target a version of Python that is not a part of that range I will have to be a bit more careful while coding 😁 .

[davidgardenier]

While I wish everyone would use the most up-to-date python version, I know I lot of people who are stuck on 3.4 for reasons outside of their control. I think it's safe to skip support for Python 2, it shouldn't be too much effort to support all Python 3 versions. The only real difference I've found in support are f-strings (only supported in Python >= 3.6).

Best of luck with the PR!

[astrogewgaw]

@davidgardenier I will keep all that in mind and will let you and @loostrum know when I have something that works 👍🏾 !