🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 1cibc0INNpjq@darkstar.UCSC.EDU, sla@umbra.ucsc.edu (Steve Allen) writes:
>I am looking through the NOST 100-0.3b standard document trying to be
>very sure about one point:
>
>    Section 5.3.2.1 specifies that a "character string shall be composed
>    only of ASCII text."
>
>    Section 6.1 specifies that characters shall be 7-bit ASCII
>
>These specifications do not preclude the existence of unprintable characters
>(ASCII 0 through 31 and 127) in a character string.  Is it intended that
>unprintable characters be legal?  Are there FITS readers which will be
>confounded by unprintables?

If you look on p. 5 of the same document, "ASCII text" is defined as ASCII
characters in the range of hex 20 to 7E.  This was done in order to have to
avoid repeating this every time we wanted to refer to printable ASCII text.

So the statement does NOT allow unprintable characters.

The distinction is further clarified in Appendix E (pp. 63-43).

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