issues: 2198196326

What happened?

Passing no data to the Dataset constructor can result in a very unhelpful "tuple index out of range" error when this is a clear case of malformed input that we should be able to catch.

What did you expect to happen?

An error more like "tuple must be of form (dims, data[, attrs])"

Minimal Complete Verifiable Example

Python xr.Dataset({"t": ()})

MVCE confirmation

• [X] Minimal example — the example is as focused as reasonably possible to demonstrate the underlying issue in xarray.
• [X] Complete example — the example is self-contained, including all data and the text of any traceback.
• [X] Verifiable example — the example copy & pastes into an IPython prompt or Binder notebook, returning the result.
• [ ] New issue — a search of GitHub Issues suggests this is not a duplicate.
• [X] Recent environment — the issue occurs with the latest version of xarray and its dependencies.

Relevant log output

```Python

IndexError Traceback (most recent call last) Cell In[2], line 1 ----> 1 xr.Dataset({"t": ()})

File ~/Documents/Work/Code/xarray/xarray/core/dataset.py:693, in Dataset.init(self, data_vars, coords, attrs) 690 if isinstance(coords, Dataset): 691 coords = coords._variables --> 693 variables, coord_names, dims, indexes, _ = merge_data_and_coords( 694 data_vars, coords 695 ) 697 self._attrs = dict(attrs) if attrs else None 698 self._close = None

File ~/Documents/Work/Code/xarray/xarray/core/dataset.py:422, in merge_data_and_coords(data_vars, coords) 418 coords = create_coords_with_default_indexes(coords, data_vars) 420 # exclude coords from alignment (all variables in a Coordinates object should 421 # already be aligned together) and use coordinates' indexes to align data_vars --> 422 return merge_core( 423 [data_vars, coords], 424 compat="broadcast_equals", 425 join="outer", 426 explicit_coords=tuple(coords), 427 indexes=coords.xindexes, 428 priority_arg=1, 429 skip_align_args=[1], 430 )

File ~/Documents/Work/Code/xarray/xarray/core/merge.py:718, in merge_core(objects, compat, join, combine_attrs, priority_arg, explicit_coords, indexes, fill_value, skip_align_args) 715 for pos, obj in skip_align_objs: 716 aligned.insert(pos, obj) --> 718 collected = collect_variables_and_indexes(aligned, indexes=indexes) 719 prioritized = _get_priority_vars_and_indexes(aligned, priority_arg, compat=compat) 720 variables, out_indexes = merge_collected( 721 collected, prioritized, compat=compat, combine_attrs=combine_attrs 722 )

File ~/Documents/Work/Code/xarray/xarray/core/merge.py:358, in collect_variables_and_indexes(list_of_mappings, indexes) 355 indexes_.pop(name, None) 356 append_all(coords_, indexes_) --> 358 variable = as_variable(variable, name=name, auto_convert=False) 359 if name in indexes: 360 append(name, variable, indexes[name])

File ~/Documents/Work/Code/xarray/xarray/core/variable.py:126, in as_variable(obj, name, auto_convert) 124 obj = obj.copy(deep=False) 125 elif isinstance(obj, tuple): --> 126 if isinstance(obj[1], DataArray): 127 raise TypeError( 128 f"Variable {name!r}: Using a DataArray object to construct a variable is" 129 " ambiguous, please extract the data using the .data property." 130 ) 131 try:

IndexError: tuple index out of range ```

Anything else we need to know?

No response

Environment

Xarray main