Subject: re: rewriting NAXIS2

From: pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov (William Pence)
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 93 17:58:45 EST

Last week I wrote:

> There is one thing to watch out for when creating ASCII FITS tables
> with FITSIO that initially have an unknown number of rows.  The FITS
> Standard requires that any fill bytes at the end of an ASCII table be
> set equal to ASCII Spaces, not NULs ...

Since then I've found a way within FITSIO to initialize the FITS ASCII
tables with Spaces, even in the case where the total number of rows in
the table is initially unknown.  Thus users no longer have to take any
special precautions to guard against any illegal NUL characters in the
extension.  This fix is available in the latest micro-release (V3.407)
of FITSIO, available  from the /software/fitsio directory in the
legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov anonymous ftp account.

Also, this release provides a new subroutine, ftrdef, which makes it
easier to recalculate the size of the table extension after the
total number of rows is known and the NAXIS2 keyword had been correctly
updated.  Previously, users had to calculate the size of the extension
themselves and pass it to FITSIO with the ftddef subroutine.  Now
users can just call the ftrdef subroutine and FITSIO will recalculate
the extension size itself, based on the current value of the NAXISn keywords.
See the new FITSIO.DOC or .TEX file for more details.

-Bill Pence