Jonathan, > Should we put a general convention in CF that text attributes can only > contain US ASCII characters? I think that would avoid some problems.
However it would also appear to place a new restriction on variable (and dimension) names that is not currently in CF, namely that only US ASCII characters could be used in such names. I don't believe the current CF has any such restriction on the characters used in variable names. This new restriction follows, because variable and dimension names are used in text attribute values for attributes such as coordinates, bounds, cell_measures, cell_methods, and formula_terms. Unidata added support for UTF-8 names some time ago to permit non-English variable, attribute, and dimension names in netCDF files. This was done is a way that did not break backward compatibility: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/netcdf/docs/faq.html#fv22 That means there may already be CF-compliant data that makes use of non-ASCII characters in variable and dimension names and hence in text attributes such as coordinates. --Russ _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
