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John and Wendy, > Thanks for your rapid and helpful reply to our netCDF questions. > And, in future, we will direct any questions to support, however, since > you are now somewhat familiar with our dilemma we will hound you > with one further elaboration. No problem. > We are mulling over the possibility of modifying the ncgen parser > to recognize any set of characters between square brackets as > a valid variable identier (e.g. [Foo bar] or [Foo (bar)]). To do this > we would modify ncgen.l, adding something like: > > [\[].+[\]] { > if ((yylval = lookup(yytext)) == NULL) { > yylval = install(yytext); > } > return (IDENT); > > and modify ncgen.y, adding code to "varspec:" to strip off the > square brackets before storing the identifier. Any opinions, > thoughts, or comments? This sounds feasible. Without trying it, I can't think of any problems you would encounter, other than having to maintain a separate version of ncgen that would have to be kept up-to-date with our ncgen bug fixes and changes. We do have some ncgen bug fixes included in the upcoming release 2.4, but no major enhancements. > Is the mailing list still address@hidden as > described in the 2.3 manual? Yes. But the way you subscribe to it has changed. To subscribe or unsubscribe, see the WWW document http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/mailing-lists.html or question 22 of the netCDF FAQ at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/faq.html > Thanks for looking into nc2text and text2nc for us. Since more > and more of our data are being stored in database formats it > is easiest for us to dump these data out in CDL format and > then use an ncgen-like utility for getting them into netCDF. Harvey Davies' nc2text utility apparently has the same restrictions as ncgen, requiring variables to begin with a letter and contain only alphanumeric characters, "_", or "-". There may be other third-party netCDF software that has similar restrictions, but I don't know for sure. --Russ ______________________________________________________________________________ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://www.unidata.ucar.edu