ASCII table tricks

[Steve Allen]

>From the ASCII tables definition it appears that it would be possible
to make a table which is truly human-readable by naive tools.

Say that the table is written with 1-column gaps between the fields
that contain the character '|', and that there is an extra column
after the last field which contains an ASCII newline character.
In this case the table would automatically appear on screen in a
very presentable fashion.

Or the gaps between fields could be multiple-character strings
guaranteed not to occur in the body of any of the fields, and the
end-of-row could be multiple characters (to make even DOS happy).  In
this case the data unit of the ASCII table could also conform exactly
to the input format required by some database table dump/load tools.

Furthermore, data unit of this kind of table would be relatively
simple to edit using many text editors.  The characters in the gaps
would make it quite straightforward to preserve the structure.

Does the standard permit this, or did I miss some constraint?

Is anyone writing FITS ASCII tables with these intents?
--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 408 459 3046     FAX: +1 408 454 9863
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