Stats Program and User Interface

(Applications Programming Interface)

 

Stats Server is used to query 2MASS All-sky Point Source statistic database which reside at IRSA. These data can be accessed via an interactive front end (filling in a web form for searching data), as well as via an HTTP GET/POST program interface where the request is a set of "parameter=value" pairs. This document describes these input parameters and how to use the Stats Sever API to query 2MASS All-sky Point Source statistic data archived at IRSA throuhg HTTP program interfaces or through a web form.

 

The general format of an HTTP GET query is:

[URL of program]?[keyword1=value1]& [keyword2=value2]&...[keywordn=valuen]

The values of special ASCII characters such as "+" must be represented in hexadecimal URL encoding form. A complete list is available at https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp. Some common characters are given below:

URL-encoding special characters:
Character URL encoding
Plus ("+") %2B
Comma (",") %2C
Forward slash ("/") %2F
Colon (":") %3A
Semi-colon (";") %3B
Equals ("=") %3D
Question mark ("?") %3F
Space (" ") %20
Quotation marks (") %22
Less than ("<") %3C
Greater than (">") %3E
Percent ("%") %25

 

The URL for Stats server

https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/Stats/nph-stats

 

CGI parameters:

The server accepts the following keywords, which are analogous to the search fields on the Stats web form:

Parameter Required Unit Description
locstr Y   Query center.
radius Y deg Radius of a regional search.

 

Example for Generating HTML Output

(1) Regional Search with an object "m31"
Click to run and view the result
https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/Stats/nph-stats?locstr=m31&radius=1.0