Is a card without equals character fixable?

[MSeifert04]

The current documentation of fits verification states that a card like "FIX4 2" should be fixable. However it currently isn't fixable:

>>> from astropy.io import fits
>>> c = fits.Card.fromstring('FIX4 2')
>>> c.verify('fix')
WARNING: The following header keyword is invalid or follows an unrecognized non-standard convention:
FIX4 2                                                                           [astropy.io.fits.card]

I'm not sure if that ever worked or when that regression was introduced. But should such a card be fixable?

[ayush1999]

>>> from astropy.io import fits
>>> c = fits.Card.fromstring('FIX4 2')
>>> c.verify('fix')
WARNING: The following header keyword is invalid or follows an unrecognized non-standard convention:
FIX4 2 [astropy.io.fits.card]
>>> d = fits.Card.fromstring('FIX1 = 2.1e23')
>>> d.verify('fix')
WARNING: VerifyWarning: Verification reported errors: [astropy.io.fits.verify]
WARNING: VerifyWarning: Card 'FIX1' is not FITS standard (invalid value string: '2.1e23'). Fixed 'FIX1' card to meet the FITS standard. [astropy.io.fits.verify]
WARNING: VerifyWarning: Note: astropy.io.fits uses zero-based indexing.
[astropy.io.fits.verify]
>>> c.verify('fix')
>>>

`

Once we've fixed the second card, the first one (FIX4 2) gets fixed without any warning. That's weird. Any idea why this is happening? @MSeifert04

[MSeifert04]

@ayush1999 Not sure what you mean and how it relates to the issue here.

But it's normal that a second c.verify('fix') doesn't print any warnings - you already verified and fixed it a few lines above.

However this issue was about how c can be fixed. It could fix it by having FIX4 as keyword and 2 as value, at least the old documentation indicated that. However as far as I can see that never worked (at least for astropy, no idea when and if it worked in pyfits) and I don't know if it should work.

[embray]

This could be seen as either a bug or a feature request... :)

I think it should be considered fixable by treating whitespace equivalently to the missing equal sign.