General: Parameters

Recognized parameters

Name	Description	Required
version	The version of the API which should be used. This affects both parameter parsing, and the result. Version changes are documented in a separate chapter. If no version is specified, a warning message will be issued and the services will default to version 1. Accepted values: `1`…`3`. Type: `Integer`	Yes
out	The services support data output in different formats. By default, the answer is returned in JSON format, but it is also possible to request the data in JSON-P, Javascript, XML, plain text or binary format. While XML and JSON/Javascript formats are supported by all services, plain text and binary is only supported by specific services. Please see the documentation for the individual services for more details. Note that the plain text and binary output method may also include a CSV representation. To enable JSON-P or Javascript output, you also have to specify the parameters `callback` or `varname`. For output in plain text and binary formats, please also specify the `template` parameter to select the desired format. Type: `String` Accepted values: `xml`, `js` (for JSON, JSON-P and Javascript), `blob` (for binary) or `text`. Default value: `js`	No
prettyprint	Set this parameter to 1 to receive the XML or JSON/Javascript output with line breaks and indentations. If set to zero, or unset, the output will be returned in compact form. This parameter is not applicable to the plain text output format. Type: `Boolean` Accepted values: `0` or `1` Default value: `0`	No
charset	This parameter controls the desired charset of the response. For XML and JSON output, characters which cannot be represented by the desired charset, will be represented by the corresponding XML character entity (e.g. `ø`) or Unicode escape sequence (e.g. `\u00f8`). For plain text output, those characters will be approximated by one or more similarly looking characters, or substituted by a question mark (`?`). Type: `String` Accepted values: UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ASCII Default value: `UTF-8`	No
callback	This parameter switches the output method to JSON-P and allows to specify the method name that should receive the result. You can choose this identifier freely to suit your needs. Type: `String` Example: `parseResponse` Condition: only required for JSON-P output.	Conditional
varname	This parameter switches the output method to Javascript and allows to specify the variable name the output data should be assigned to. Type: `String` Example: `o` Condition: only required for Javascript output.	Conditional
template	(Only for plain text output) Specify the template that should be used for the plain text output format. The list of available templates can be found in the individual service documentation. Accepted values: dependent on the called service. Type: `String` Condition: only required for plain text output.	Conditional

General response elements

Name	Description
version	Every response will include this element. The value will be set to `1` unless the API has to be changed in an incompatible way (i.e. an element was removed, renamed or changed its type – an addition may happen without increase in the version number). Type: `Integer`
billing	Every response will include this element. The value will be set to how many credits the request cost. Usually this will be `1` but in certain cases, like with the astrodata service you may be charged more per request depending on how much data you requested. Type: `Integer`
error (XML), errors (JSON)	This element will only be included in the response if errors occurred while processing your request. In this case, the response will not contain further elements. For the XML format, the element will be repeated as many times as necessary, while for the JSON format, the messages are modeled as an array. Type: String (XML), array of strings (JSON)