issue_comments: 234540415

I agree.

.3. Couldn't this make the dict blow up for large datasets? Maybe there could be a flag that lets the user decide whether to leave the data in its current form (could use self.data in case it is a dask array) 6. The trouble with xarray.DataArray is that it doesn't require a name but it can have one. Is that something that we would want to preserve? If not, then maybe it would look more like this.

``` tolist=True

d = {'coords': {}, 'attrs': dict(self.attrs), 'dims': self.dims}

def func(x, tolist): if tolist: return x.tolist() return x

for k in self.coords: d['coords'].update({k: {'data': func(self[k].data, tolist), 'dims': list(self[k].dims), 'attrs': dict(self[k].attrs)}}) if hasattr(self, 'data_vars'): d.update({'data_vars': {}}) for k in self.data_vars: d['data_vars'].update({k: {'data': func(self[k].data, tolist), 'dims': list(self[k].dims), 'attrs': dict(self[k].attrs)}}) else: d.update({'data': func(self.data, tolist)}) ```