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Handle non-ASCII characters in FITS header #6074
Description
Opening this issue about non-ASCII (e.g. UTF-8) characters in FITS header, which is a quite common issue with many duplicates (if I'm not mistaken), but I cannot find an issue to gather all (related: #2887 #5732 #5396 #3497). #2887 has a test file, other test files are welcome.
This is not standard but it should be possible to display these headers and to allow fixing them. Quoting @embray (#2887 (comment)):
It's probably a relatively easy fix. If nothing else the header parser needs to catch non-ASCII bytes and either replace them with a replacement character (e.g. '?' and/or raise an error--perhaps depending on a setting).
Activity
mcara commentedon May 16, 2017
#5093 seems to be somewhat related to this issue too (though for header padding I think parser could safely ignore non ASCII characters).
saimn commentedon May 16, 2017
@mcara - Indeed. Do you still have the problematic files ?
Handle non-ASCII characters in FITS header
mcara commentedon May 17, 2017
@saimn https://stsci.box.com/s/v2szxbpazaxu2y4f2h7et9wkykmghw5h (link set to expire on August 31st, 2017).
In my opinion non-ASCII characters should not be supported. From the section 3.2 of https://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/standard40/fits_standard40draft1.pdf:
In section 3.3.2 of the same document, it says:
I do not think that
astropyshould be facilitating use of non-standard FITS files.saimn commentedon May 17, 2017
@mcara - Thanks for the file. About "facilitating use of non-standard FITS files", the goal here is not to allow writing non-standard FITS files, but just to read them, to be able to fix the problematic cards.