issue_comments: 258476068

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/1077#issuecomment-258476068 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/1077 258476068 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDI1ODQ3NjA2OA== 4160723 2016-11-04T16:14:59Z 2016-11-04T16:14:59Z MEMBER

I have the exact same applications than yours @tippetts, but I also would like to write netCDF files that are compatible with other tools than just xarray. With the category encoded values as the default behavior, my concern is that xarray users may be unaware that they generate netCDF files which have limited compatibility with 3rd-party tools, unless a clear warning is given in the documentation.

One consideration in favor of this is that it will soon be very easy to switch a MultiIndex back into separate coordinate variables, which could be our recommendation for how to save netCDF files for maximum portability.

This should be fine, but maybe it would be nice to allow handling this automatically (at read and write) by using a specific encoding attribute? I haven't got much into xarray's IO and serialization logic, so I don't know if it is the right approach. This would be convenient for loading back the generated netCDF files with both xarray and 3rd-party tools, though.

 
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