[CF-metadata] New standard name: datetime_iso8601 (Seth McGinnis)

From: Schultz, Martin <m.schultz>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:27:51 +0000

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" <mcginnis at ucar.edu>
>To: <cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu>
>Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] New standard name: datetime_iso8601
>Message-ID: <web-45204487 at 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



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH
52425 Juelich
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Juelich
Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Dueren Nr. HR B 3498
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: MinDir Dr. Karl Eugen Huthmacher
Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr. Achim Bachem (Vorsitzender),
Karsten Beneke (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Bolt,
Prof. Dr. Sebastian M. Schmidt
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Fri Mar 22 2013 - 16:27:51 GMT