[CF-metadata] New standard name: datetime_iso8601

From: Seth McGinnis <mcginnis>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:31:47 -0600

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

>Im proposing that time coordinates may be expressed as strings, in addition to
>the current way of using time offsets from a base date expressed as a string
>in the unit attribute. The two date string syntaxes (standalone and in the
>unit attribute) c/should be the same.
Received on Fri Mar 22 2013 - 14:31:47 GMT