Re: interest in HDF5 support in Octave?

[Joao Cardoso]

address@hidden wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I noted that "Use HDF for binary data" was on the project wishlist.  I am
> interested in this too.  I am thinking about implementing it (and have
> already done some work...see below) and wanted to gauge the interest of
> other octave users and developers for this.
>
> For those of you who don't know, HDF is a portable binary format and free
> supporting library developed at NCSA in Illinois, and is designed for
> storing large scientific datasets.
>
> A single HDF file can contain many data sets, annotations, hierarchical
> groups of data sets, and so on.  Supporting it in octave would mean the
> ability to easily interchange data with a wide variety of other scientific
> computing tools, projects, and visualization programs.  Standard formats
> are good!
>
> I have written an Octave plugin to import 1d/2d data slices from
> multidimensional HDF5 files (and will be posting it to octave-sources in
> the next few days, once I clean it up a bit).  But, what I would really
> like to do is to add a new "-hdf5" option to the "save" and "load"
> commands, allowing you to store all of your octave data (or a subset) in a
> single HDF5 file.  I think this shouldn't be too hard to do.  (One can't
> load arbitrary HDF files because octave doesn't support 3+ dimensional
> data sets...so my slice importer will still be useful.)

I think that this effort should be made on the new Octave-2.1.x series, using
the new 'list' data structures. That will enable the use of multidimensional
data (using 'lists' as a data container).

Given the release pace of the 2.1.x series, I believe that a new stable
release will be available soon -- buy I might be wrong. Anyway, the new
Control Toolbox is available only for the 2.1.x series.

Joao

> Cordially,
> Steven G. Johnson

--
Joao Cardoso                |   e-mail: address@hidden
INESC, R. Jose Falcao 110   |   tel:    + 351 2 2094322
4050 Porto, Portugal        |   fax:    + 351 2 2008487





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