[AstroPy] Opening file in PyFits, works in v2.4, not in v3.0.6

[Phil Hodge]

On 04/03/2012 10:09 AM, Erik Bray wrote:
> Specifically, the problem in this file that PyFITS is breaking on is
> that the header block is not filled with spaces.  According to the FITS
> standard any extra bytes at the end of a header block must be spaces,
> and not nulls as is the case in this file.
>
> I'm not sure what PyFITS should do here.  Should it treat a file like
> this as an error, or should it just produce a warning?  Given that other
> tools (including earlier PyFITS versions) seem to be accepting of this,
> I'm leaning toward the latter.  There's no reason PyFITS can't ignore
> the standard here and read the file anyways.  That said, it's still
> malformatted...

I'm strongly in favor of allowing the user to open the file unless it's 
totally incomprehensible.  If you can't open it you can't fix it.  In 
order to open a really messed-up file, it would be reasonable to require 
setting a flag, of course.

I could read this file using catfits (in iraf/stsdas), and that let me 
see why fverify complained about the ORIGIN keyword, which was useful:

ORIGIN  = 'Miner's View Observatory'

There's a quote within the quoted string, so the value was interpreted 
as "Miner".

Phil