UDUNITS-2 Released

Unidata recently released the second generation UDUNITS package.  The UDUNITS-2 package provides support for units of physical quantities (e.g. meters, seconds). Its three main components are:

1. a C library for units of physical quantities;
2. a utility; for obtaining the definition of a unit and for converting numeric values between compatible units; and
3. an extensive database of units.

The UDUNITS package supports conversion between string and binary representations of units, arithmetic manipulation of units, and conversion of numeric values between compatible units. The package is written in the C programming language.

For more information, see http//:www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/udunits/udunits-2/udunits2.html

The UDUNIT-2 package differs from the original UDUNITS package in the following ways:

• Support for non-ASCII characters
• Support for logarithmic units
• Persistent value converters
• Improved API
• XML unit database
• No Fortran or Perl API

One thing that has not changed is that all unit string specifications understood by the original UDUNITS package are also
understood by the new UDUNITS-2 package.