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Hi Reimar, > we recognized the development of netCDF3.6.0-beta3. > > > It would be fine if we could get added the plus sign (+) to the allowed > signs for netCDF variables. > > > I am sorry I have missed to ask this before. I can't see any objections to allowing "+" in names that don't also apply to "-" which has been allowed from the beginning. I'll have to make sure it doesn't cause any new problems. We already have objections to allowing '.' in variable names, because it conflicts with the most natural syntax for specifying structure members in netCDF-4 and in the current Java interface. How difficult would it be for you to require escaping some of these special characters in variable names, for example instead of permitting the variable name 'a.b(c)', requiring 'a\.b\(c\)'? If we required escaping special characters in variable names, we could allow all special characters, including blanks. We're considering this for netCDF-4, as well as permitting Unicode for names. I realize there are backward compatibility problems, I'm just wondering how serious the backward compatibility issue is at this point, since it will only get worse and eventually make such a change impossible. --Russ