Re: netCDF-to-XML Dump Utility?

>To: address@hidden
>From: David Han <address@hidden>
>Subject: Re: 20020910: netCDF-to-XML Dump Utility? 
>Organization: NASA/GSFC
>Keywords: xml ncml

Hi David,

> Are there any utilities out there that extracts the contents of a 
> netCDF file into a XML file?  If not, do you have any plans for 
> developing such an utility?  It'd nice if such an capability is 
> available through the ncdump utility.

Yes, although the early effort at this, ncxdump, used a proposed XML
representation for netCDF that we have since revised.  The latest
version of an XML representation is called "NcML":

  http://www.scd.ucar.edu/vets/luca/netcdf/

That web page includes links to the following web application:

  http://www.scd.ucar.edu/vets/luca/netcdf/extract_metadata.htm

that lets you specify a URL for netCDF data and returns its XML
representation.  Source for the application is available:

  Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 07:29:16 -0600
  From: Luca Cinquini <address@hidden>
  Subject: Re: regarding netcdf extraction and sample code

  o If your netcdf files are local to the machine you will be running the 
  extraction program, extracting the metadata should be really simple.
  Just download the jar file ncx.jar from the web page at 
  http://www.scd.ucar.edu/vets/luca/netcdf/index.html (which also contains 
  the javadoc)
  and for example use the included java class NcxCrawler, which extracts 
  all the metadata from a directory tree of netcdf files. For example:

  java ucar.ncx.NcxCrawler -indir:/home/luca/test/input -inext:nc 
  -outdir:/home/luca/test/output -outext:.xml -outtree:true

  (of course ncx.jar must be in the classpath).

  If instead your files are only retrievable by network, you might want to 
  start from the class ucar.ncx.Ncx which accepts a URL as input.
  The source code for all classes is included in ncx.jar.
  Note also that you will also need in the classpath the java netcdf 
  library (downloadble from 
  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf-java/ )
  and the standard XML java packages for DOM and SAX (and optionally JDOM).

  Please let us know of any problems and/or suggestions, since this 
  software (and the NcML specification) is only in beta version and we 
  would like to make it useful to the community.

--Russ

P.S. If you send support questions like this to
"address@hidden" instead of directly to me, they will be
routed to someone who can answer them even if I am away from my email.