list of all variable names from a NetCDF dataset, in R

Question

I'm using the RNetCDF package in R. I'm trying to get a list of all variables names from an imported .nc datasets (I can easily get the vector of values from the few variables whose names I know, but I only know a small subset of all the variables names).

Answer 1

I use the ncdf pacakge which I found to be much easier to install than the RNetCDF package across operating systems (notably Linux and MacOS). To get the list of variables you simply:

library(ncdf)
nc = open.ncdf('example.nc')
variables = names(nc[['var']])