astropy/astropy — pull request #1346 by taldcroft (2014-01-10 22:54:00+00:00)
Title: Issues with byte strings in ASCII table output

When writing the following table to an ASCII file in Python 3:

```
from astropy.table import Table
table = Table.read('http://mpia.de/~robitaille/astropy/test.vot')
table.write('test.txt', format='ascii.fixed_width')
```

The output is:

```

| Prog | Name | Obs | tos | Type | Vel | n_Vel | Flow | n_Flow | Fhigh | n_Fhigh | Conf | RAJ2000 | DEJ2000 |
| b'N032' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2003-12-06' | 16800 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 80578 | b'L' | 203407 | b'L' | b'6Cp' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.8' |
| b'N032' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2004-05-15' | 1140 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 80578 | b'L' | 203407 | b'L' | b'6Dp' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.8' |
| b'N032' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2004-05-15' | 7740 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 80578 | b'L' | 203407 | b'L' | b'6Dp' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.8' |
| b'N032' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2004-05-16' | 24060 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 80578 | b'L' | 203407 | b'L' | b'6Dp' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.8' |
| b'N032' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2004-05-17' | 3060 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 80578 | b'L' | 203407 | b'L' | b'6Dp' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.8' |
| b'PB3F' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2005-12-25' | 4050 | b'MAP' | 0.0 | b'L' | 86610 | b'L' | 230538 | b'L' | b'6Cq' | b'20:29:24.80' | b'+40:11:19.0' |
| b'PB3F' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2005-12-26' | 4050 | b'MAP' | 0.0 | b'L' | 86610 | b'L' | 230538 | b'L' | b'6Cq' | b'20:29:24.80' | b'+40:11:19.0' |
| b'P04A' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2006-02-03' | 9000 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 80578 | b'L' | 203407 | b'L' | b'6Aq' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.5' |
| b'PB3F' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2006-06-03' | 675 | b'MAP' | 0.0 | b'L' | 86610 | b'L' | 230538 | b'L' | b'5Dq' | b'20:29:24.80' | b'+40:11:19.0' |
| b'PB3F' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2006-06-04' | 7425 | b'MAP' | 0.0 | b'L' | 86610 | b'L' | 230538 | b'L' | b'5Dq' | b'20:29:24.80' | b'+40:11:19.0' |
| b'PB4A' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2007-02-19' | 9450 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 80126 | b'L' | 81030 | b'L' | b'6Aq' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.5' |
| b'PA4A' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2007-03-04' | 10800 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 203055 | b'L' | 203739 | b'L' | b'6Aq' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.5' |
| b'PA4A' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2007-03-13' | 10935 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 203055 | b'L' | 203739 | b'L' | b'6Bq' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.5' |
| b'PA4A' | b'AFGL2591' | b'2007-03-15' | 9450 | b'MAP' | -5.5 | b'L' | 203055 | b'L' | 203739 | b'L' | b'6Bq' | b'20:29:24.87' | b'+40:11:19.5' |
```

but I think the writers need to be smarter and not show the ``b'...'``.