For a given URL (e.g., http://test.opendap.org/dap/data/nc/coads_climatology.nc) and a given variable in that data set (e.g., SST), you would ask for a those data to be returned as ASCII using the following:
http://test.opendap.org/dap/data/nc/coads_climatology.nc.ascii?SST. Note that you can take the base URL (http://test.opendap.org/dap/data/nc/coads_climatology.nc) and append '.html' to it and get a web page that provides a way to see the names of the variables in a data file, a way to build up more complex constraints interactively and to get those data in several different formats, including ASCII and NetCDF, from any recent DAP server such as Hyrax. Another way to get data as a NetCDF file is to use a client that can access OPeNDAP data and knows how to output netCDF files. A simple example is the NCO (NetCDF Operators) package like this: ncks http://test.opendap.org/dap/data/nc/coads_climatology.nc?SST out.nc The NCO package supplies various command line tools for manipulating netCDF files and can be made OPeNDAP aware. See our "Available OPeNDAP Clients" web page for more information on NCO. Notes: * NCO tools can also be used to dump data in ASCII (like the OPeNDAP '.asc' extension) or IEEE binary format. * In this example, the client expects to be passed a DAP URL, so the response format component is not used (i.e., "coads_climatology.nc" is used with a DAP-aware client like NCO, while "coads_climatology.nc.ascii" is used with a browser that does not contain special code to process the DAP URL).
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