> @ajelenak-thg said: In the HDF5 case, string encoding is an intrinsic part > of the HDF5 string datatype and can only be ASCII or UTF-8. Both char and > string datatypes in the context of this discussion are stored as HDF5 strings.
Actually the ASCII/UTF-8 restriction is not enforced by the HDF5 library. This is used intentionally by netcdf developers to support arbitrary character sets in netcdf-4 data type **`char`**, both attributes and variables. See netcdf issue [298](https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/298). Therefore, data type **`char`** remains fully interoperable between netcdf-3 and netcdf-4 formats. For example, [this](https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/files/2230157/iso-8859-1.nc4.gz) netcdf-4 file contains a **`char`** attribute and a **`char`** variable in an alternate character set. You will need an app or console window enabled for ISO-8859-1 to properly view the ncdump of this file. -- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues/141#issuecomment-407954242
