visidata_pdr: Load tabular data into VisiData using PDR

This VisiData plugin adds a loader that can load any type of tabular data understood by the Planetary Data Reader (PDR).

Installation

It is necessary to install PDR and its dependencies as well as the plugin’s own code. The easiest way to do this is to install the plugin package, visidata_pdr, using pip, into the Python runtime context where VisiData looks for its libraries. For example, if VisiData is installed via pipx,

pipx inject visidata visidata_pdr

will do the job. If you have installed VisiData some other way, you will need to use different commands (please suggest additional examples for this section).

Copying visidata_pdr.py into VisiData’s local plugins directory is not recommended, as this will not install PDR.

Usage

After installing the plugin and its dependencies, the pdr loader can open any PDS product pdr.open() understands. It cannot retrieve a product’s files from the network; you must have all the files locally available before you begin. (It is easy to forget to download external table format files, or to download only some of the data files associated with a label.)

Loading PDS data into VisiData is probably most useful for tables of records, but you can also load images; these will be presented as a matrix of the image pixels’ values.

For example, suppose you have downloaded the Mars Global Surveyor’s Thermal Emission Spectrometer data set and you want to look at the first batch of data (MY24; 1999-02-28T21):

vd -f pdr TES_COD_IR_MY24_Ls090_Ls120.xml

It would also work to specify the .dat file for this product. Either way, the loader will create one sheet for the label itself, and another sheet for each data object described by the label (whether or not it is stored in the files on the command line). The sheet for the label itself will be selected initially; use standard VisiData sheet navigation to reach other sheets.

Data sheets are lazily loaded; each actual data file will not be opened until the sheet for one of its data objects is selected. Therefore, if you are missing some of the data files or external format files associated with a label, you won’t be notified until you try to access one of the sheets for which data is missing. However, if you start by telling VisiData to load one of the data files associated with a label, VisiData core requires that that file exists, before giving the pdr loader a chance to look at it.

The plugin does provide a “guess” function that tries to identify files that pdr.open would understand, but its guesses are treated as lower priority than all of the built-in loaders for specific file formats, so, for example, omitting the -f pdr from the above command will cause TES_COD_IR_MY24_Ls090_Ls120.xml to be loaded as a generic XML file, not a PDS4 label. (We hope to improve this in the future.)

Comments, suggestions, bug reports, etc.

We are actively looking for feedback on the user experience of this plugin. Please file all commentary, suggestions, etc. as GitHub issues: https://github.com/MillionConcepts/visidata-pdr/issues

Licensing

Copyright 2026, Million Concepts LLC.

Redistribution and use are permitted under the terms of the 3-clause BSD license; see LICENSE.md for exact terms.