pydata / pydata/xarray

Make cftime dateoffsets public

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API design topic-cftime
Dominant language
Python
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Description

Consider the following cftime vector. It's fairly common to see users asking how to subtract "1 month" from this kind of vector:

xr.set_options(display_style="text")
time = xr.DataArray(
    xr.cftime_range("1000-01-01", "1000-05-01", freq="MS", calendar="360_day"), dims="time", name="time"
)
time
<xarray.DataArray 'time' (time: 5)>
array([cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False),
       cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False),
       cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 3, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False),
       cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 4, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False),
       cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 5, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False)],
      dtype=object)
Coordinates:
  * time     (time) object 1000-01-01 00:00:00 ... 1000-05-01 00:00:00

Subtracting pd.Timedelta("1 month") does not work because a month does not represent an absolute unit of time. Instead the solution appears to be:

time - xr.coding.cftime_offsets.MonthBegin(1)
<xarray.DataArray 'time' (time: 5)>
array([cftime.Datetime360Day(999, 12, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False),
       cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False),
       cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False),
       cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 3, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False),
       cftime.Datetime360Day(1000, 4, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, has_year_zero=False)],
      dtype=object)
Coordinates:
  * time     (time) object 1000-01-01 00:00:00 ... 1000-05-01 00:00:00

I think pandas exposes this functionality as pd.DateOffset(months=1). Can we add a similar xr.DateOffset?

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with xarray.coding.cftime_offsets.MonthBegin and the surrounding cftime offset implementation. Compare the requested behavior with pandas.DateOffset and the shown DataArray subtraction example. Done means the cftime date-offset functionality is exposed through the requested public xarray API and the demonstrated month subtraction works as described.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
pandas, python
Domain
api, data
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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