VOTABLE format is preferred as input for VOSTAT since besides column names it has other information. However, to allow simple datasets to take advantage of the routines here, we also allow ascii input with the following conventions:

• Lines starting with a # are considered comments and ignored
• The first line that does not start with a # is considered to be a line with column headers. Column names are taken from there. If you do not have this line, the first row of data gets interepreted as column names.
• The ascii parser has no way of knowing non-numeric columns from numeric ones and it is the user's responsibility to choose the appropriate ones.

An example ascii file will look like this:

# This is a comment
Col1	Col2 col3
#
#
111	23.111	17
11.1	23		17
# comment here is okay
123 11	19
# end of file