[sylvesterkaczmarek]

Fixes #370.

Decode HDF5 scalar attribute bytes through the shared normalizer and decode string arrays before reference handling. Fixed- and variable-length storage now compare as the same text, including multidimensional arrays, while numeric arrays and object-reference resolution retain their existing behavior.

Validation on macOS arm64, Python 3.12.11:

• Full offline suite: 68 passed, 1 authenticated integration test deselected, including 13 new cases. Ten new cases failed before the fix.
• Existing NetCDF text/CSV/Excel golden checks passed unchanged.
• The observed ATL06 fixture total remains 4,978; no expected-count or fixture changes were needed.
• Ruff, formatting, and git diff --check passed. Changelog updated.

Live Earthdata downloads and Windows/Linux runs were not performed. The separate list-truncation issue #371 is outside this change.

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📚 Documentation preview 📚: https://ncompare--372.org.readthedocs.build/en/372/

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 97.11%. Comparing base (6596ce2) to head (8a7f46c).
⚠️ Report is 1 commits behind head on develop.

Additional details and impacted files

@@             Coverage Diff             @@
##           develop     #372      +/-   ##
===========================================
+ Coverage    97.08%   97.11%   +0.02%     
===========================================
  Files            9        9              
  Lines          584      589       +5     
===========================================
+ Hits           567      572       +5     
  Misses          17       17              

Flag	Coverage Δ
python-3.11	97.11% <100.00%> (+0.02%)	⬆️
python-3.12	97.11% <100.00%> (+0.02%)	⬆️
python-3.13	97.11% <100.00%> (+0.02%)	⬆️
python-3.14	97.08% <100.00%> (+0.02%)	⬆️

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[sylvesterkaczmarek]

@danielfromearth This HDF5 attribute decoding fix is now refreshed onto current develop, 0 behind, with all Python 3.11-3.14 tests and Codecov checks green and no unresolved review threads. It has been open since September 10 without a review. Could you review the current head when convenient?

[danielfromearth]

Thanks for another useful contribution, @sylvesterkaczmarek! This fixes the b'NASA' problem nicely. Good edge-case coverage too with non-ASCII, empty strings, the literal b'NASA', and the empty array.

One small thing: _value_to_comparable_str is private but now imported into Comparison.py, so could you drop the underscore?

[sylvesterkaczmarek]

Done in 6bf2c9f. I renamed the helper to value_to_comparable_str and updated the imports, internal calls, and test docstring so its cross-module use is explicit. git diff --check and Python compilation are clean; fresh hosted checks can validate the branch.