2007 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > NetCDF APIs
5.8 Perl APIs
There are actually at least two Perl APIs for netCDF, one developed at
Unidata and another contributed library.
- Installation on RedHat systems easy from RPMs.
- NetCDFPerl documentation fairly complete, just use old
netCDF-2 User's Guide with small document that
describes differences.
- ncmanipulate package available for
modifying the schema of a netCDF file (adding, deleting, or renaming
dimensions, variables, and attributes).
Other NetCDFPerl Characteristics
- Supported by Unidata, but in maintenance mode only
- Building and installing can be a
challenge on new platforms.
- Based on the old netCDF-2 C interface, need to use netCDF-2 documentation.
- No further development currently planned.
- Newer, based on netCDF-3
- Uses PDL (the Perl Data
Language) with capabilities similar to Matlab and IDL.
- Installation is straightforward.
- perldl, a simple interactive shell for PDL, is available for
interactive prototyping of scripts.
- Fast when dealing with large multidimensional arrays.
Examples
Annotated examples of complete Perl netCDF programs (using
DL::NetCDF) are available from
the program examples page.
2007 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > NetCDF APIs
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