The ATNF catalogue is a very useful way to get information on pulsar parameters, but I wanted to be able to download the parameters in the style of TEMPO par files for some subset of pulsars based on a condition. To do this I’ve created a python script to query the ATNF catalogue for all information for all pulsars given a certain condition e.g. “f0 > 10” and output them in a .par file. This script (dowloadable here) requires the BeautifulSoup python package. An example of it’s use is:
./create_pulsar_files.py -c “f0 > 10” -o pulsardir
where the -c specifies the required condition for the returned pulsars (in this case only return ones with a frequency greater than 10 Hz) as described here, and the -o gives the output directory for the par files. All files will be output using the pulsar’s “J” name. By default the script returns all parameter, i.e. “long” format, but a shorter “short” format can be output using the -s argument – see Section 3.4.1 of the ATNF catalogue documentation.