ASCII table tricks

[Steve Allen]

In article <199608301312.JAA06260 at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov>,
William Pence  <pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote:
>Steve Allen wrote:
>> 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.

But wait, playing standards lawyer for a moment I point out that
section 8.1.5 is about "entries" in the table.

In section 8.1.3 it states
  "The table is constructed from a two-dimensional array of ASCII characters."
which means anything in 7-bit ASCII.

I believe the standard is saying that the data fields themselves may
only contain printable text, but that portions of the table outside
the fields may contain other ASCII charcters.

In particular, I believe this permits the tricks I suggested.

If this is not what the standards writers intended then the
language of section 8.1.3 needs clarification.

--
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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