Attributes

In object-oriented programming, a class contains fields (state variables containing data) and methods (subroutines or procedures defining the object’s behavior in code). Fields may also be known as members, attributes, or properties. To avoid confusion with NetCDF’s terminology of attribute, this document uses field to refer to a class’s state variable.

NetCDF attributes are small, supplementary metadata that annotates variables or files. NetCDF attribute is not a Python class by itself. Instead, it is a field of python dictionary in class pnetcdf.File and class pnetcdf.Variable. Their data types can be any allowed by the classic NetCDF file formats. The most common data type is text for annotation purpose. NetCDF attributes can be created, accessed, and manipulated using python dictionary-like syntax. An attribute can be associated to a file, referred to as golbal attribute, as well as to individual variables, referred to as variable's attribute. Pythonic interfaces for accessing attributes are is provided both in class pnetcdf.File (for global attributes) and class pnetcdf.Variable (for variable attributes). Example programs are examples/global_attribute.py and examples/put_var.py.