updating integer header key to double does not work

[juliantaylor]

updating a header key that is integer to double format fails wit pyfits 3.2 and current git head:

import pyfits
print pyfits.__version__
f = pyfits.PrimaryHDU()
f.header['TEST'] = 1
h = pyfits.HDUList()
h.append(f)
h.writeto('test.fits', clobber=True)
del h
del f

f = pyfits.open('test.fits', mode='update')
print type(f[0].header['test'])
print 'assign a float'
f[0].header['test'] = 1.0
print 'new type', type(f[0].header['test'])

output:

3.2.dev
Overwriting existing file 'test.fits'.
<type 'int'>
assign a float
new type <type 'int'>

the type remains integer even though I want a float. A work around is to set it to e.g. 1.0000001 which will then trigger the conversion.

[embray]

So basically you want it to show up in the header as 1.0 instead of just 1. That's fairly similar to an issue I recently fixed where True and 1 were treated as identical as well as False/0--clearly wrong. I agree, this should be fixed.

[embray]

Should be fixed.