issues: 341643235

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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
341643235 MDU6SXNzdWUzNDE2NDMyMzU= 2292 Support non-string dimension/variable names 3888181 open 0     18 2018-07-16T19:15:13Z 2021-11-26T07:52:42Z   NONE      

Problem description

Currently, it appears that "dimension"/"coordinate" labels must be strings. However, in more rigorous software engineering applications it is often desirable to use something more organized/structured for labels, e.g. enums. I think it would be great if xarray supported this.

Obviously storing to e.g. NetCDF necessitates string-valued field names, so I would think calling str could be appropriate when performing this sort of serialization. This is what pandas seems to do (see below). But I imagine there might be other issues that would need to be resolved to do what I'm suggesting...?

Code sample

```python import enum

import numpy as np import pandas as pd import xarray as xr

class CoordId(enum.Enum): LAT = 'lat' LON = 'lon'

pd.DataFrame({CoordId.LAT: [1,2,3]}).to_csv()

Returns: ',CoordId.LAT\n0,1\n1,2\n2,3\n'

xr.DataArray( data=np.arange(3 * 2).reshape(3, 2), coords={CoordId.LAT: [1, 2, 3], CoordId.LON: [7, 8]}, dims=[CoordId.LAT, CoordId.LON], )

Fails: TypeError: dimension CoordId.LAT is not a string

```

Output of xr.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS ------------------ commit: None python: 3.6.5.final.0 python-bits: 64 OS: Linux OS-release: 4.15.0-1010-gcp machine: x86_64 processor: x86_64 byteorder: little LC_ALL: None LANG: C.UTF-8 LOCALE: en_US.UTF-8 xarray: 0.10.7 pandas: 0.23.1 numpy: 1.14.5 scipy: 1.1.0 netCDF4: 1.3.1 h5netcdf: 0.5.0 h5py: 2.7.1 Nio: None zarr: None bottleneck: None cyordereddict: None dask: None distributed: None matplotlib: 2.1.1 cartopy: 0.16.0 seaborn: None setuptools: 39.2.0 pip: 9.0.1 conda: None pytest: 3.6.1 IPython: 6.4.0 sphinx: None 
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     13221727 issue

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