Open as an ASCII table, returning a :class:`astropy.table.Table` object.
        Keyword arguments are passed to :func:`astropy.io.ascii.open`; valid
        ones likely include:

        - ``names = <list>`` (column names)
        - ``format`` ('basic', 'cds', 'csv', 'ipac', ...)
        - ``guess = True`` (guess table format)
        - ``delimiter`` (column delimiter)
        - ``comment = <regex>``
        - ``header_start = <int>`` (line number of header, ignoring blank and comment lines)
        - ``data_start = <int>``
        - ``data_end = <int>``
        - ``converters = <dict>``
        - ``include_names = <list>`` (names of columns to include)
        - ``exclude_names = <list>`` (names of columns to exclude; applied after include)
        - ``fill_values = <dict>`` (filler values)

def read_astropy_ascii (self, **kwargs):
        """Open as an ASCII table, returning a :class:`astropy.table.Table` object.
        Keyword arguments are passed to :func:`astropy.io.ascii.open`; valid
        ones likely include:

        - ``names = <list>`` (column names)
        - ``format`` ('basic', 'cds', 'csv', 'ipac', ...)
        - ``guess = True`` (guess table format)
        - ``delimiter`` (column delimiter)
        - ``comment = <regex>``
        - ``header_start = <int>`` (line number of header, ignoring blank and comment lines)
        - ``data_start = <int>``
        - ``data_end = <int>``
        - ``converters = <dict>``
        - ``include_names = <list>`` (names of columns to include)
        - ``exclude_names = <list>`` (names of columns to exclude; applied after include)
        - ``fill_values = <dict>`` (filler values)

        """
        from astropy.io import ascii
        return ascii.read (text_type (self), **kwargs)