Note: This remark was originally part of issue #4. Split of to separate the discussions.
Use case
In issue #4 references between variables are discussed. These occur in space separated lists, and as such they put a limitation on the allowable characters in object names.
The problem
NetCDF-4 allows an object name like "χ²" (\u03C7\u00B2). This is probably very good for human readability, but accessing the field from a program or script (non-interactively) is probably pretty hard.
To get the string into this text file I went into an interactive python3 shell, and asked it to print("\u03C7\u00B2"), and those numbers were obtained from a website. Other computer systems may offer more convenient access.
Terminology
For some of the terminology refer to “CDM Object Names” and the discussion summary of issue #4.
In particular, an “object name” refers to the short name of either a group, variable, dimension, attribute, type definition or field in a compound datatype.
Suggested solution
The short names of NetCDF-4 objects must match the regular expression: [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*. This means that the name of a NetCDF-4 object can be used as a variable name in most programming languages.
If there is a need to attach a name to a variable that requires the use of other characters, then an attributes can be used. A possible solution for this would be an attribute with the name “local_name_zh_CN” for a Chinese localisation. The end of the attribute name follows ISO 639-1/ISO 639-2.
Now all we need is a code for “mathematical localisation”.
Note: This remark was originally part of issue #4. Split of to separate the discussions.
Use case
In issue #4 references between variables are discussed. These occur in space separated lists, and as such they put a limitation on the allowable characters in object names.
The problem
NetCDF-4 allows an object name like "χ²" (\u03C7\u00B2). This is probably very good for human readability, but accessing the field from a program or script (non-interactively) is probably pretty hard.
To get the string into this text file I went into an interactive python3 shell, and asked it to print("\u03C7\u00B2"), and those numbers were obtained from a website. Other computer systems may offer more convenient access.
Terminology
For some of the terminology refer to “CDM Object Names” and the discussion summary of issue #4.
In particular, an “object name” refers to the short name of either a group, variable, dimension, attribute, type definition or field in a compound datatype.
Suggested solution
The short names of NetCDF-4 objects must match the regular expression:
[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*. This means that the name of a NetCDF-4 object can be used as a variable name in most programming languages.If there is a need to attach a name to a variable that requires the use of other characters, then an attributes can be used. A possible solution for this would be an attribute with the name “
local_name_zh_CN” for a Chinese localisation. The end of the attribute name follows ISO 639-1/ISO 639-2.Now all we need is a code for “mathematical localisation”.