April 25, 2017
10:50 p.m.
Actually, for what it's worth, the FITS spec says that in such values trailing spaces are not significant, see page 7: https://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/standard40/fits_standard40draft1.pdf But they're not really relevant to numpy's situation, because as here you need to do elaborate de-quoting before they can go into a data structure. What I was wondering was whether people have data lying around with fixed-width fields where the strings are space-padded, so that numpy needs to support that. I would say whether to strip space-padded strings should be the reader's problem, not numpy's -CHB