Non-ascii characters in FLEXTRA output

[hcpxvi]

A problem that occurs with FLEXTRA is that the output file can contain non-ascii characters. This happens because the variable datestring(1:24) is written out, but the non-standard call which would have filled it with today's date is commented out, meaning that the variable is never initialised. The simplest fix is to edit opencetoutput.f, openflightoutput.f and openoutput.f . In each case, find the comment

C      call fdate(datestring)

and immediately after it insert the line

      datestring="----- Not Available ----"

One could just remove the print statements that print out datestring(1:24) but the above suggestion keeps the layout of the output file identical to how it was before, while ensuring that it is pure ascii.

The non-ascii characters are benign to some users, but can cause trouble for anyone trying to read the FLEXTRA output into python 3.