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/5563#issuecomment-1061502981,https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/5563,1061502981,IC_kwDOAMm_X84_RUAF,5821660,2022-03-08T07:56:53Z,2022-03-08T07:56:53Z,MEMBER,"Automatic decoding of bytes was implemented in #477 to properly decode returned bytes for CF decoding. In the case of non-utf-8 this brakes as shown. 

`hdf5` (and with that `netCDF4`) only has a notion of ASCII and UTF-8 for encoding (see `h5py` docs, https://docs.h5py.org/en/stable/strings.html#encodings). So the example above creates a non-standard file.

The question is **what** should be returned in the non-standard case if the attribute contains non-utf-8 encoded bytes? We could catch the `UnicodeDecodeError` and return something else (what?). But that would open the door for breakages with decoding CF metadata. I'm not sure if that can be properly resolved within xarray.

Why are those attributes in non-utf-8 encoding? Legacy data?
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