delete

Deletes variables, attributes, and coordinate variables.

Prototype

	procedure delete (
		data       
	)

Arguments

A variable of any type or dimensionality. As of V6.0.0, this can be a list of variables. See the examples section below.

Description

This procedure is used to delete variables, attributes, and coordinate variables from NCL. delete does not work for deleting file variables, file attributes, or file coordinate variables. This procedure is especially useful if you want to reuse a variable, but the new values and/or types are different than the original variable.

When a variable is passed to delete, all of the memory associated with the variable's value and its reference in the symbol table are removed. If an attribute or coordinate variable is passed in, it is deleted from the variable it belongs to.

Note that if the variable being deleted is an object (like a plot object or a workstation object) and the variable contains the only reference to that object, the object will be destroyed.

If the workstation object is a PS, PDF, or NCGM file, then, delete has the added benefit of causing the file to be closed properly, if for some reason you need to exit the script early, but want to close the workstation properly.

See destroy for the ability to destroy objects without deleting the variable they point to.

Deleting multiple variables: in version 6.0.0-beta, you can delete multiple variables of mixed types and sizes by using the special syntax "[/" and "/]" around the variables you want to delete. See example 4 below.

See Also

new, destroy

Examples

Example 1

  x = (/1,2,3,4,5/)

  delete(x)                 ; The delete is necessary because x
  x = (/1.,2.,3.,4.,5./)    ; was originally an integer array.

Example 2

  x = (/1,2,3,4,5/)

  delete(x)          ; The delete is necessary because x
  x = (/1,2,3,4/)    ; was originally an array of 5 elements.

Example 3

Assume x is a large 4D array with named dimensions "lat", "lon", "lev", and "time", and you want to reorder it to "time", "lev", "lat", and "lon". If you don't need to keep the original x variable around, then delete it:

  xnew = x(time | :, lev | :, lat | :, lon :)
  delete(x)

Example 4

In alpha-test mode: to delete multiple variables, you can use the special "list" type to create a list of variables, and pass this to delete:

  lat  = fspan(-90,90,64)
  lon  = fspan(-180,180,128)
  data = random_uniform(-10,10,(/10,20,30/))
  varnames = (/"T","P","U","V"/)    ; 1D string array
  . . .
  delete([/data,varnames,lat,lon/])

  print(lon(0))    ; This would produce an error that "lon" is undefined