Dear All,
As others have said, I think this debate is irrelevant as there should be no need for string timestamps in NetCDF. Providing a Standard Name only encourages what I consider to be bad practice.
Cheers, Roy.
-----Original Message-----
From: cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu [mailto:cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu] On Behalf Of Ben Hetland
Sent: 20 October 2010 09:14
To: cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] New standard names for satellite obs data
On 19.10.2010 16:27, Seth McGinnis wrote:
> What about using 'date' for string-valued times? That was my homebrew
> solution when I was considering a similar problem.
If I may butt in and contribute here, I usually prefer names like
'datetime' or 'timestamp' in cases like this, because 'date' is
potentially confusing. It may not be immediately obvious to a future
reader (or programmer) that a variable called 'date' supports points in
time down to for example seconds of accuracy.
> (Note that string data is a big pain to deal with in NetCDF-3, because
> you're limited to fixed-length character arrays. You need to use
> NetCDF-4 / HDF5 to get Strings as a data type.)
(It may not be such a practical issue with ISO 8601 strings, as a
reasonable max. length can be determined, I presume.)
--
Regards,
-+-Ben-+-
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Received on Wed Oct 20 2010 - 02:59:57 BST
