[bug #61462] Crash on FITS binary table colums with repeat of 0

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61462>

                 Summary: Crash on FITS binary table colums with repeat of 0
                 Project: GNU Astronomy Utilities
            Submitted by: makhlaghi
            Submitted on: Wed 10 Nov 2021 05:46:44 PM UTC
                Category: Libraries
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Crash
                  Status: Confirmed
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: makhlaghi
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

As of Gnuastro 0.16, when a FITS binary table column has a "repeat" factor of
0 (in the respective 'TFORM' column, which means that this column has no
contents, for example '0A' for a string column), Gnuastro crashes with the
following CFITSIO error:


FITSIO status = 308: bad first element number
First element to write is too large: 1; max allowed value is 0 


This crash happened because until now, Gnuastro was assuming that all columns
have at least one element! We hadn't accounted for having a zero-element
column!

I am busy writing an implementing a check so in such cases, blank values are
replaced for the respective column and CFITSIO isn't called at all.

This bug was reported by Andres Del Pino Molina, thanks to data from the
J-PLUS data archives (for the 'skymapper2' column of J-PLUS DR2).




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