issue_comments: 295657656

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/1378#issuecomment-295657656 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/1378 295657656 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDI5NTY1NzY1Ng== 668201 2017-04-20T09:50:19Z 2017-04-20T09:53:33Z NONE

I cannot see a use case in which repeated dims actually make sense.

In my case this situation originates from h5 files which indeed contains repeated dimensions (variables(dimensions): uint16 B0(phony_dim_0,phony_dim_0), ..., uint8 VAA(phony_dim_1,phony_dim_1)), thus xarray is not to blame here. These are "dummy" dimensions, not associated with physical values. What we do to circumvent this problem is "re-dimension" all variables. Maybe a safe approach would be for open_dataset to raise a warning by default when encountering such variables, with possibly an option to perform automatic or custom dimension naming to avoid repeated dims. I also agree with @shoyer that failing loudly when operating on such DataArrays instead of providing confusing results would be an improvement.

 
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