issues: 1853356670

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id node_id number title user state locked assignee milestone comments created_at updated_at closed_at author_association active_lock_reason draft pull_request body reactions performed_via_github_app state_reason repo type
1853356670 I_kwDOAMm_X85ud_p- 8074 Add an ```only_variables``` or similar option to ```xarray.open_dataset``` and ```xarray.open_mfdataset``` 8382834 open 0     7 2023-08-16T14:23:43Z 2023-08-21T06:55:17Z   CONTRIBUTOR      

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Sometimes, a variable in a nc file is corrupted or not "xarray friendly" and crashes opening a file (see for example https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/8072 ; I solved this on my machine by just drop_variablesing the problematic variables in practice), or reading and parsing the full file or mf-file may be expensive and time consuming, while only a couple of variables are needed.

Describe the solution you'd like

We already can exclude variables with the drop_variables arg to open_dataset (note: this is not present for now in open_mfdataset, should it be added there?), but could we also instead of saying "read all the variables instead of this list", be able to say "read only these variables"? In most case, this would be equivalent of using drop_variables=list(set(all_vars)-set(list_insteresting_vars), but in case some (many vars) may be corrupted, just getting the file opened to list these all_vars may be problematic.

Describe alternatives you've considered

drop_variables=list(set(all_vars)-set(list_insteresting_vars), but this is a lot more verbose.

Additional context

No response

 
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