writing and reading character arrays to netCDF

Greetings,
    I'm using NCL to write out a character array to a netCDF flie and
then read it back in for processing using a different NCL script. Some
of the time my arrays are all just _FillValue, which I have set to the
null character. However, if I dump the resulting netCDF file after it is
written, these show up as lower case Ls (e.g. "l"). When I read the
netCDF file back in using my other script, the _FillValue attribute is
"l". This causes a warning message because I am trying to assign the
read data to a multidimensional array which already has a _FillValue
set to the null character. So I get the warning:

fatal:Attribute assignment type mismatch

Does anyone know about why this is happening? Does netCDF represent the
null character as an "l"?

Thanks,
    Jonathan

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Received on Thu Mar 05 2009 - 12:39:57 MST