Subject: Re: comment field

From: thompson at stars.gsfc.nasa.gov (William Thompson, code 682.1, x2040)
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 23:28:00 GMT

In article <1992Nov16.211426.8939 at sol.UVic.CA>, durand at dao.nrc.ca writes...
>We are trying to desing special fits ingesters for moving headers content into a 
>database system when we encounter the following case:
> 
>CARD    = 'data 2.5' '  / 10 '
> 
>This card (I just type in the worst case we could imagine) has no comment but how to detect
>that. It seams that each case we have with a single quote following a slash will create an
>ambigous situation. Is there any solution to this?. 
> 
>We have checked within the standard FITS document and haven't found anything which will 
>remove this ambiguity.

Is this a recommended FITS entry?  I would have thought that you wanted either:

CARD    = 'data 2.5''  / 10 '

or

CARD    = 'data 2.5'' ''  / 10 '

Quote characters inside character strings are supposed to be doubled to signal
that the string doesn't end there--that should remove the ambiguity.

Bill Thompson