html_url,issue_url,id,node_id,user,created_at,updated_at,author_association,body,reactions,performed_via_github_app,issue
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/742#issuecomment-274641536,https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/742,274641536,MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDI3NDY0MTUzNg==,1217238,2017-01-23T22:42:18Z,2017-01-23T22:42:18Z,MEMBER,Fixed by #996,"{""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,130753818
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/742#issuecomment-242239306,https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/742,242239306,MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDI0MjIzOTMwNg==,1217238,2016-08-24T23:27:41Z,2016-08-24T23:27:41Z,MEMBER,"@jcmgray Yes, that looks about right to me. The place to add this in would be the `unique_variable` function:
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/blob/master/xarray/core/merge.py#L39

 I would use `'notnull_equals'` rather than `'nonnull_equals'` just because that's the pandas term.
","{""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,130753818
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/742#issuecomment-227053256,https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/742,227053256,MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDIyNzA1MzI1Ng==,1217238,2016-06-20T05:29:59Z,2016-06-20T05:29:59Z,MEMBER,"@JamesPHoughton @jcmgray For empty array creation, take a look at  https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/277 and https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/878 -- this functionality would certainly be welcome.

> To go with this (and this might be separate issue), a set_value method would be helpful --- just so that one does not have to remember which particular combination of...

@jcmgray Beware -- none of these are actually supported! See the big warning [here](http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/indexing.html#indexing-with-labeled-dimensions) in the docs. If you think a `set_value` method would be a better reminder than such warnings in the docs I would be totally open to it. But let's open another issue to discuss it.
","{""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,130753818
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/742#issuecomment-226249845,https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/742,226249845,MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDIyNjI0OTg0NQ==,1217238,2016-06-15T16:54:45Z,2016-06-15T16:54:45Z,MEMBER,"I think this could make it into merge, which I am in the process of refactoring in https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/857.

The key difference from @jcmgray's implementation that I would want is a check to make sure that the data is all on different domains when using `fillna`. `merge` should not run the risk of removing non-NaN data.

@JamesPHoughton I agree with @jcmgray that the dtype=object is what you should expect here. It's hard to create fixed length strings in xarray/pandas because that precludes the possibility of missing values, so we tend to convert strings to object dtype when merged/concatenated.
","{""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,130753818
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/742#issuecomment-178997890,https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/742,178997890,MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDE3ODk5Nzg5MA==,1217238,2016-02-03T04:23:31Z,2016-06-15T16:50:43Z,MEMBER,"This is actually closer to the functionality of [`concat`](http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/combining.html#concatenate) than merge. Hypothetically, something like the following would do what you want:

```
# note: this is *not* valid syntax currently! the dims arguments
# does not yet exist.
# this would hypothetically only align along the 'y' dimension, not 'x'
aligned = xr.align(*das, join='outer', dims='y')
combined = xr.concat(aligned, dim='x')
```

In cases where each array does not already have the dimension you want to concat along, this already works fine, because you can simply omit `dims` in align.
","{""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,130753818