Support reading strings?

[maximsch2]

It would be great if this library would support reading arrays of strings from HDF5 files.

[sabhiram]

Could you propose a sample usage?

[maximsch2]

I'm not sure what you mean. I ocasionally use HDF5 as a cross-language storage format (with the advantage of being able to memory-map it) and would like to be able to store and load arrays of strings among other things. I think the original request was related to storing descriptions of the samples stored in another HDF5 collection.

[jpfairbanks]

I am using HDF5 to interoperate with some matlab code and need to store and load strings in HDF5 files.

package main
import ("fmt"
            "github.com/ready-steady/hdf5")
func main() {
	fp, _ := hdf5.Create("strings.hdf5")
	defer fp.Close()
	fp.Put("key", []string{"Hello", "HDF5"})
	st := &[]string{}
	fp.Get("key", st)
	fmt.Printf("The String Array is: %v\n", st)
}

Which gives an error message

  #000: H5D.c line 294 in H5Dopen2(): unable to open dataset
    major: Dataset
    minor: Can't open object
  #001: H5Dint.c line 1362 in H5D__open_name(): not found
    major: Dataset
    minor: Object not found
  #002: H5Gloc.c line 428 in H5G_loc_find(): can't find object
    major: Symbol table
    minor: Object not found
  #003: H5Gtraverse.c line 867 in H5G_traverse(): internal path traversal failed
    major: Symbol table
    minor: Object not found
  #004: H5Gtraverse.c line 639 in H5G_traverse_real(): traversal operator failed
    major: Symbol table
    minor: Callback failed
  #005: H5Gloc.c line 383 in H5G_loc_find_cb(): object 'key' doesn't exist
    major: Symbol table
    minor: Object not found
The String Array is: &[]

[jpfairbanks]

Note that if you want to store a single string, you can use []byte(str) to store your string as an array of bytes, which might work for some use cases.