ASCII table reader drops meta data for empty table

Hi!

Firstly thanks for all the great work!!

Secondly, it may be a stupid question (or I’m incompetent when it comes to reading the docs), but it seems that ascii.read drops any meta data when passed an empty table. Is there a way to force it to keep the comments even if the table is empty?

Here’s what I have:

>>> from astropy.io import ascii
>>>
>>> tbl = ascii.read("""
... # hello
... # world
... name place
... """)
>>>
>>> tbl.meta
OrderedDict()

When reading the empty table, the .meta dict is empty, even though there are comments

>>> tbl = ascii.read("""
... # hello
... # world
... name  place
... earth home
... """)
>>>
>>> tbl.meta
OrderedDict([('comments', ['hello', 'world'])])

But as soon as there is one or more entries in the table, the .meta contains the comments.

Is there anyway around this? Maybe by specifying a specific reader?

Many thanks for all you do!

[taldcroft]

See #8274 for a fix.

[astronomyk]

@taldcroft Brilliant! Thanks heaps for the tip. I wasn’t overjoyed by my workaround 😃