[AstroPy] "ASCII" tables that contain non-ASCII characters

[Paul Kuin]

Complain to NIST, I think is the best approach. ASCII is well-defined.

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 10:45 PM, Benjamin Alan Weaver <baweaver at lbl.gov> wrote:
> Hello y'all,
>
> We are trying to read "ASCII" tables containing atomic line data
> provided by NIST.  When you request the line wavelength data in
> angstroms, NIST very helpfully labels the columns with the angstrom
> symbol (Å), which is not strictly part of the ASCII character set.
>
> We can read these tables with Table.read() *and* the environment
> variable LANG=en_US.utf-8 set.  However, if LANG is not set,
> Table.read() fails to decode these files.
>
> As far as I can tell the underlying read() function in astropy.io.ascii
> does not accept keywords related to the file encoding.
>
> So two questions:
>
> 1. Is the lack of an encoding keyword a bug that should be reported?
>
> 2. Is there a workaround that does not rely on LANG being set?
>
> Kia ora koutou,
> Benjamin Alan Weaver
>
> --
> We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
>   --Wernher von Braun
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