Skip to content

better handling of invalid files in open_mfdataset #6736

@vnoel

Description

@vnoel

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Suppose I'm trying to read a large number of netCDF files with open_mfdataset.

Now suppose that one of those files is for some reason incorrect -- for instance there was a problem during the creation of that particular file, and its file size is zero, or it is not valid netCDF. The file exists, but it is invalid.

Currently open_mfdataset will raise an exception with the message
ValueError: did not find a match in any of xarray's currently installed IO backends

As far as I can tell, there is currently no way to identify which one(s) of the files being read is the source of the problem. If there are several hundreds of those, finding the problematic files is a task by itself, even though xarray probably knows them.

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be most useful to this particular user if the error message could somehow identify the file(s) responsible for the exception.

Apart from better reporting, I would find it very useful if I could pass to open_mfdataset some kind of argument that would make it ignore invalid files altogether (ignore_invalid=False comes to mind).

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions