TOFITS(1)

✨ NAME ✨

okay so bestie, meet tofits — the lil tool that turns a list of keyrecords into a valid FITS file 💖 (it's in the User Commands section, so it's a real one, iykyk)

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So basically tofits takes a whole list of FITS header keyrecords — one per line, no cap — and glows them up into a proper FITS header. How? It pads every single one with blanks until it hits 80 characters and strips the newline characters out. 💅

Then, if it needs to, it also pads the whole header so it lands on an integral number of 2880-byte blocks. Like, the header is not allowed to be a weird in-between size, periodt.

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The input byte stream is assumed to be ASCII-encoded. And here's the tea ☕: any characters that live outside the set of text characters FITS allows (that's ASCII 0x20 to 0x7E) get ignored 🙈 — with literally one single exception. If a byte has the value 0xA0 (which is the non-breaking space in all variants of ISO/IEC 8859), it gets translated into an ordinary space (0x20). So like, a little glow-up for that one byte. ✨

Which means input encoded in ISO/IEC 8859 or UTF-8 should be interpreted correctly! 🎀 And any illegal characters sitting in keycomments? Just quietly ignored, no drama, we don't talk about them. 💀

tofits has no options — zero, none, nothing to configure, she simply is — and it operates as a filter, reading from stdin and writing to stdout, e.g.

tofits < infile > outfile

And one more thing bestie: input lines beginning with '#' are treated as comments. Slay. 💜

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mwah 💋 random date but iconic: this is tofits version 8.9, from June 2026 — go off, king 👑