**Title:** Remove restrictions on netCDF object names **Moderator:**
**Moderator Status Review:** New issue, 2020 January 23 **Requirement Summary:** None. **Technical Proposal Summary:** Remove [CF 1.7 section 2.3](http://cfconventions.org/Data/cf-conventions/cf-conventions-1.7/cf-conventions.html#_naming_conventions) restrictions on characters in names of variables, attributes, etc. Resolve ambiguous use of such restrictions. **Benefits** * Support international usage. * Allow special characters in names. * Remove ambiguity over requirement versus preference. * Simplify CF rules. * Simplify conformance checking. * Improve compliance for some existing data sets. **Caveats** * Breaks compliance with COARDS name rules, but is a superset of them. * Some existing softwares can not handle non-traditional characters. They would need upgrades, but only when presented with new files using expanded character set. **Status Quo:** Object names are now restricted to a traditional yet limited character set which does not accommodate many non-western languages, nor other desired naming patterns. **Detailed Proposal:** Change the first paragraph of [2.3 Naming Conventions](http://cfconventions.org/Data/cf-conventions/cf-conventions-1.7/cf-conventions.html#_naming_conventions) as follows. The remainder of **2.3** is left unchanged. **Current version (1.8 draft):** * Variable, dimension, attribute and group names should begin with a letter and be composed of letters, digits, and underscores. Note that this is in conformance with the COARDS conventions, but is more restrictive than the netCDF interface which allows use of the hyphen character. The netCDF interface also allows leading underscores in names, but the NUG states that this is reserved for system use. **Proposed:** * Variable, dimension, attribute, and group names are not generally restricted by this convention. Any names that are acceptable to the netCDF library may be used. The most notable rules from netCDF are ASCII or UTF-8 character set, and names should not begin with underscore or certain other special characters. Refer to file format specs in the NUG for more details. -- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues/237 This list forwards relevant notifications from Github. It is distinct from cf-metad...@cgd.ucar.edu, although if you do nothing, a subscription to the UCAR list will result in a subscription to this list. To unsubscribe from this list only, send a message to cf-metadata-unsubscribe-requ...@listserv.llnl.gov.
