character dimensions, attribute lengths

[Nan Galbraith]

Thank you, all. I will pass along this information; I'm a little relieved
to know that this practice is not generally accepted. It was not something
I had seen before, but one of my colleagues seemed to think that it was
standard procedure:

> I would prefer to keep these dimensions because they fix a size limit
> to the character strings. This can be usefull to avoid crashes in
> user’s software because of an unexpectedly too long string.

Reaching consensus with a large, diverse group of people all working
with different netcdf systems is quite a challenge, but we may be getting
somewhere. I appreciate the feed back.

Cheers - Nan Galbraith

>  ... you should not be using formal Netcdf dimensions to
>  store attribute lengths. Netcdf stores the length of each attribute
>  separately; this is not to be confused with formal dimensions for
>  data arrays. When reading a Netcdf character attribute, you should
>  usually read the length first, then the string itself. If you are
>  doing dynamic allocation, then allocate the memory for the string
>  between the two calls.



-- 
**************************************************************
* Nan Galbraith            Upper Ocean Processes Group       *
* Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Woods Hole, MA 02540  *
* http://uop.whoi.edu      (508) 289-2444                    *
**************************************************************

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