issues: 707571360

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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
707571360 MDU6SXNzdWU3MDc1NzEzNjA= 4452 Change default for concat_characters to False in open_* functions 6130352 open 0     2 2020-09-23T18:06:07Z 2022-04-09T03:21:43Z   NONE      

I wanted to propose that concat_characters be False for open_{dataset,zarr,dataarray}. I'm not sure how often that affects anyone since working with individual character arrays is probably rare, but it's a particularly bad default in genetics. We often represent individual variations as single characters and the concatenation is destructive because we can't invert it when one of the characters is an empty string (which often corresponds to a deletion at a base pair location, and the order of the characters matters).

I also find it to be confusing behavior (e.g. https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4405) since no other arrays are automatically transformed like this when deserialized.

If submit a PR for this, would anybody object? 

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     13221727 issue

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