John Caron wrote:
Jeff Whitaker wrote:
Ed Hartnett wrote:
Jeff Whitaker <jswhit@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
In netcdf-4.0, I don't see how to create variables which are arrays of
strings with length > 1. I see how to create arrays of
single-characters, and arrays of variable-length strings, but not
strings of a specified length.
Am I missing something, or is this not supported by HDF5?
Howdy Jeff!
Strings are variable length by their nature.
How about a two dimensional array of NC_CHAR?
Thanks,
Ed
Ed: I use arrays of fixed length strings, padded with spaces, quite
a bit. This simplifies the memory management issues associated with
arrays of variable length strings (which have no counterpart in
Fortran 90/95, although they are allowed in Fortran 2003). Below is
an excerpt from my previous reply which explains why I don't like
using 2-D arrays of characters to represent 1-D arrays of
fixed-length strings:
Russ: I realize you can use a array of shape ndim,8 to store an array
of ndim 8 character strings. Thats the way I've done it with
netcdf-3 - it just feels clunky. A typical use case for me is
station data, where you want to store the name of the station. I end
up the with an array of characters shaped (nstations,ncars) - in
fortran I read it into an (nstations,nchars) character(len=1) array
(after first finding out what both nstations and nchars are), then
reshape it into a (nstations) character(len=nchars) array. I'd
rather just read it into a character(len=nchars) array straight off.
Not a show stopper for sure, but it would be more convenient. I
realize that specifying the data type would be tricky, instead of
NC_CHAR, do you have a bunch of new types NC_CHAR1, NC_CHAR2, ...
NC_CHAR120? Or a new function datatype = nc_set_chartype(nchars)?
However, I bet it would get used a lot more than the esoteric
datatypes you have in netcdf-4 already (enums and opaque for example).
Hi Jeff:
Suppose we stuck with fixed length char arrays for this case, but
added a convenience method in the API that did the work for you. What
would that convenience method look like?
John
John: A convenience method won't really help much - the thing I'd most
like to avoid is defining another dimension to hold the number of
characters in each string. Essentially, I'd like to have that
information transferred to the datatype.
-Jeff
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