how to read date and time on ecmwf file

Question

I have global datasets in netcdf file. Time information on data file is:

<type 'netCDF4._netCDF4.Variable'>
int32 time(time)
    units: hours since 1900-01-01 00:00:0.0
    long_name: time
    calendar: gregorian
unlimited dimensions: time
current shape = (5875,)
filling off

when I extracted time from file, I got this array:

array([ 876600,  876624,  876648, ..., 1017528, 1017552, 1017576], dtype=int32) 

my question is how to convert this array into proper date format? [Note: This is a daily data sets and number in an array is corresponding to an hours from 1900-01-01]

Answer 1

The ideal way to do this is using netCDF4 num2date

import netCDF4

ncfile = netCDF4.Dataset('./foo.nc', 'r')
time = ncfile.variables['time']
dates = netCDF4.num2date(time[:], time.units, time.calendar)