NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
Nan Galbraith <ngalbraith@xxxxxxxx> writes: > Sorry if this has been covered repeatedly, I have searched the unidata site > and the netcdf users guide and just don't see the issue addressed directly. > It's a "best practices" question, but is not actually answered in that > document either. > > I'm working on an implementation of NetCDF with a very varied group, > and the issue of string lengths is a real problem for some of them. All our > data is numeric; attributes are often char though. > > Some participants use software that requires them to specify string > lengths for char variables, I assume it's fortran but am not sure. Their > work-around is to declare these as dimensions in the netcdf file: > STRING256, > STRING64, STRING32, etc. I believe this is the way to go for defining char arrays in netCDF-3. Of course, you don't need to define dimensions for attributes, so if you can put your string in an attribute, that may be easier. > > This seems like a misuse of the concept of dimensions in netcdf, but I'd > like to know if it's a widely accepted way to deal with the fact that > strings > don't exist in netcdf. I'd prefer to deal with the issue in software, > and leave > this out of our specification. It seems ... messy to me, but if it's > commonly > done then I guess I'll stop arguing. > NetCDF-4, which is expected to come out in beta this Summer, offers the NC_STRING type, which addresses this problem. Ed -- Ed Hartnett -- edh@xxxxxxxx ============================================================================== To unsubscribe netcdfgroup, visit: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing-list-delete-form.html ==============================================================================
netcdfgroup archives: