issue_comments: 789714818

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4973#issuecomment-789714818 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/4973 789714818 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDc4OTcxNDgxOA== 625462 2021-03-03T13:30:10Z 2021-03-03T13:30:10Z NONE

@mathause Maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept of encoding in xarray. In the "Writing encoded data" section of the xarray doc, it states

The encoding argument takes a dictionary with variable names as keys and variable specific encodings as values. These encodings are saved as attributes on the netCDF variables on disk, which allows xarray to faithfully read encoded data back into memory.

I took this to imply that a dataset of type float64 could be "compressed" to float32 within the NetCDF4 file, and be transparently read back to a float64 data structure on reading. Having looked more closely at the NetCDF4 spec, I can't see any way to save this information into the file without adding an arbitrary non-spec attribute. Would be a cool feature, though. 

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