NCL Home > Documentation > Functions > Metadata routines

getvaratts

Returns a list of attribute names for the given variable or file pointer.

Prototype

	function getvaratts (
		var       
	)

	return_val [*] :  string

Arguments

var

Any NCL variable, or a pointer to a file opened with addfile or addfiles.

Return value

A string array containing all the names of the attributes attached to the variable or file.

Description

This function returns a list of attribute names for a given NCL variable. It can also be used to return the global attributes for a file variable opened with addfile.

If the variable or file pointer has no attributes, then the default missing value for the type "string" is returned.

In NCL version 6.5.0, in order to make the various getvarxxxx and getfilexxxx function names more meaningful and consistent, we added a getfileatts function that is an alias for getvaratts, except it only allows a variable of type "file" as input.

Examples

Example 1

  f = addfile("$NCARG_ROOT/lib/ncarg/data/cdf/Tstorm.cdf","r")
 
  reftime = f->reftime
  lat     = f->lat
  print(getvaratts(reftime))    ; should be (/"units","long_name"/)
  print(getvaratts(lat))        ; should be a missing value

Example 2

This example pulls the global attributes off a file and prints out their values:

  f = addfile("$NCARG_ROOT/lib/ncarg/data/cdf/uv300.nc","r")

  file_atts = getvaratts(f)
; file_atts = getfileatts(f)   ; use in NCL V6.5.0 or later

  print(file_atts)

  if(.not.any(ismissing(file_atts))) then
    do i=0,dimsizes(file_atts)-1
      print("Attribute " + file_atts(i) + " = " + f@$file_atts(i)$)
   end do
  end if

The output will be: