Dear Seth,
I believe your concerns nicely confirm Michael's and my viewpoint that the
real issue is a "lack of functionality" in the underlying netcdf library. If
done properly, the datetime representation in the file would of course be
numerical (python and certainly most other languages will do this also). Tools
like ncdump or ncgen (and of course the library APIs) would then be used to
obtain the string representation.
Best regards,
Martin
>Message: 2
>Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:31:47 -0600
>From: "Seth McGinnis" <mcgin...@ucar.edu>
>To: <cf-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu>
>Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] New standard name: datetime_iso8601
>Message-ID: <web-45204...@mail.ucar.edu>
>Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
>
>
>Hi all,
>
>I'm a bit late to the discussion, but I just want to go on the record as being
>(fairly strongly)
> opposed to allowing *anything* to be expressed as a string if there's a
> reasonable numeric
> representation we can use instead.
>
> Maybe I'll change my mind after the community has made the jump to netcdf4,
> but dealing
> with string data as arrays of chars under netcdf classic is a gigantic pain,
> and I want to minimize
> the amount of data that I might ever have to interact with that does that.
>
> And with regard to coordinate variables in particular, if I'm writing a
> script to analyze some
> data, I'll often want to do something (e.g., select data) that involves
> dealing with the
> coordinate as a numeric value. And in most of the processing environments I
> can think of,
> parsing a string to convert it into a number is a lot more effort than
> printing a date string
> based on a numeric representation. I'd much prefer only needing to do the
> latter.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --Seth
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