[fitsbits] Start of the CONTINUE keyword Public Comment Period

It might be useful to explicitly address some corner cases, e.g.,
long strings that end in &.

SVALUE = 'This is a long string &'
CONTINUE 'really long &'
COMMENT 'But is this part of it?'
CONTINUE 'Or is this?'

I guess that the intended value of SVALUE in this case is
'This is a long string really long &'
but I could imagine some users thinking that this is an error
or that the last & is dropped and I could even imagine some
users (conditioned by how comment lines which can appear in the
middle of statements in programs), might things that the COMMENT
is ignored and the value is
'This is a long string really long Or is this?'


You might also wish to explicitly note what is supposed
to be done with a CONTINUE statement that doesn't follow
a string ending in &. Presumably it is to be ignored.

SVALUE = 'This is a short string'
CONTINUE 'And this is not part of it'

Tom McGlynn

William Pence wrote:
This is to announce the start of the 30-day Public Comment Period on
the CONTINUE keyword convention that has been submitted for inclusion in
the 'Registry of FITS Conventions' which is maintained by the IAU FITS
Working Group. This is the 9th in a growing series of conventions
submitted for inclusion in the Registry.

Detailed information about this convention and a sample FITS file that
uses it are available for public review and comment from the FITS
registry web page at

http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_registry.html

The CONTINUE keyword allows long character string keyword values to be
continued on the next keyword(s) in the FITS header. This convention
supports string keyword values that are longer than the 68-character
maximum that can be represented in a single FITS keyword. A trivial
example of this convention is shown below:

SVALUE = 'This is a long string value that is &' / Any comments
CONTINUE 'continued over three keywords& ' / may be appended
CONTINUE ' in the FITS header.' / after the quoted value.

Under this convention, the last character of each string that is to be
continued must be the `&' character, and the continuation string is
contained in a sequence of 1 or more CONTINUE keywords (which do not
have a `=' character in column 9 and hence have no formal value).

Comments may be posted here on the FITSBITS mail exploder or the
sci.astro.fits newsgroup. Minor typographical issues may be sent
directly to the authors of the convention.

Bill Pence
(on behalf of the IAU FITS Working Group)