nyphens in TTYPEn

Are there (other than the recommendattion to use "only letters, digits,
and underscore" in 8.3.2. of the FITS standard) any rules or
recommendations which forbid or deprecate or discourage the use of an
hyphen or minus sign in the value of TTYPEn keywords of binary tables ?

A little script of mine is getting screwed up by a FITS file which
contains TTYPEn like O-INDEX or X-DEC, and (beside fmodhead'ing it) I'd
like to complain to the author of such file.

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LC's No-Spam Newsreading account wrote:
Are there (other than the recommendation to use "only letters, digits,
and underscore" in 8.3.2. of the FITS standard) any rules or
recommendations which forbid or deprecate or discourage the use of an
hyphen or minus sign in the value of TTYPEn keywords of binary tables ?

A little script of mine is getting screwed up by a FITS file which
contains TTYPEn like O-INDEX or X-DEC, and (beside fmodhead'ing it) I'd
like to complain to the author of such file.

The HEASARC has a local convention of using the underscore rather than the
hyphen as a separator character in the TTYPEn column name values in the FITS
files that it produces, however there are some cases where the hyphen is the
obvious choice and is still used (e.g., in columns containing color indices,
such as 'B-V'). This has meant that when using software, such as fv, that
performs spreadsheet-type calculations on table columns it is sometimes
necessary to enclose the column name in quote characters if the name
contains characters that could be confused with mathematical operators.

Bill Pence
--
__________________________________________________ __________________
Dr. William Pence
NASA/GSFC Code 662 HEASARC +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771 +1-301-286-1684 (fax)

LC's No-Spam Newsreading account wrote:
Are there (other than the recommendation to use "only letters, digits,
and underscore" in 8.3.2. of the FITS standard) any rules or
recommendations which forbid or deprecate or discourage the use of an
hyphen or minus sign in the value of TTYPEn keywords of binary tables ?

A little script of mine is getting screwed up by a FITS file which
contains TTYPEn like O-INDEX or X-DEC, and (beside fmodhead'ing it) I'd
like to complain to the author of such file.

The HEASARC has a local convention of using the underscore rather than the
hyphen as a separator character in the TTYPEn column name values in the FITS
files that it produces, however there are some cases where the hyphen is the
obvious choice and is still used (e.g., in columns containing color indices,
such as 'B-V'). This has meant that when using software, such as fv, that
performs spreadsheet-type calculations on table columns it is sometimes
necessary to enclose the column name in quote characters if the name
contains characters that could be confused with mathematical operators.

Bill Pence
--
__________________________________________________ __________________
Dr. William Pence
NASA/GSFC Code 662 HEASARC +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771 +1-301-286-1684 (fax)