ASCII table tricks

[William Pence]

Steve Allen wrote:

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

The FITS Standard does not allow the ASCII newline character or any
other ASCII control characters in an ASCII table.  Section 8.1.5 states
that "All data in an ASCII tables extension record shall be ASCII text ..."
and "ASCII text" is defined to be the ASCII characters hexidecimal 20-7E.

-Bill Pence
 NASA/GSFC