Character Strings

The character string values in a FITS header or in an ASCII column in a FITS table extension are generally padded out with non-significant space characters (ASCII 32) to fill up the header record or the column width. When reading a FITS string value, the CFITSIO routines will strip off these non-significant trailing spaces and will return a null-terminated string value containing only the significant characters. Similarly, when writing string values to a FITS file the CFITSIO routines expect to get a null-terminated string as input; CFITSIO will pad the string with blanks if necessary before writing it to the FITS file. Note that leading spaces in a FITS string are considered significant.

When calling CFITSIO routines that return a character string it is vital that the size of the char array be large enough to hold the entire string of characters, otherwise CFITSIO will overwrite whatever memory locations follow the char array, possibly causing the program to execute incorrectly. This type of error can be very difficult to debug, so programmers should always ensure that the char arrays are allocated enough space to hold the longest possible string, including the terminating NULL character. The fitsio.h file contains the following defined constants which programmers are strongly encouraged to use whenever they are allocating space for char arrays:

#define FLEN_KEYWORD    9  /* max length of a keyword */
#define FLEN_CARD      81  /* length of a FITS header card */
#define FLEN_VALUE     71  /* max length of a keyword value string */
#define FLEN_COMMENT   73  /* max length of a keyword comment string */
#define FLEN_ERRMSG    81  /* max length of a FITSIO error message */
#define FLEN_STATUS    31  /* max length of a FITSIO status text string */

    char value[FLEN_VALUE];