issue_comments: 1330343446

This data as json

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/7328#issuecomment-1330343446 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/7328 1330343446 IC_kwDOAMm_X85PS24W 85085 2022-11-29T09:36:10Z 2022-11-29T09:37:19Z CONTRIBUTOR

This behaviour stems from this part of _infer_dtype where empty object arrays are converted to float arrays:

https://github.com/pydata/xarray/blob/3aa75c8d00a4a2d4acf10d80f76b937cadb666b7/xarray/conventions.py#L156-L157

Is there any reason we couldn't return strings.create_vlen_dtype(str) instead?

 
{
    "total_count": 0,
    "+1": 0,
    "-1": 0,
    "laugh": 0,
    "hooray": 0,
    "confused": 0,
    "heart": 0,
    "rocket": 0,
    "eyes": 0
}
   1466586967