As discussed here Unidata/netcdf4-python#654 (comment), there is a need for conventions to specify the encoding of strings and character arrays in netcdf. There is also a need to specify whether char ...

cti.prtMulti() takes a string of any amount; will return a list (array) and print a more readable string to the console. cti.bin() takes a string of any amount; will return an array of binary values ...

You can convert a Python string to its ASCII values using a built-in function called ord (). This function takes each character in your string and gives you its numerical code in the ASCII chart.