I’ve been dealing with HDF 5 files for quite awhile, but IDL interface was as painful as the C interface. It did have H5_BROWSER and H5_PARSE to make things a bit easier, but these utilities are relevant for interactive browsing of a dataset and not for efficient, programmatic access. I created a set of routines for dealing with HDF 5 files that I have been extending as needed to other scientific data formats such as netCDF, HDF 4, and IDL Savefiles.

For example, MG_H5_GETDATA can access variables stored in HDF 5 files:

f = filepath('hdf5_test.h5', subdir=['examples', 'data'])
arr = mg_h5_getdata(f, '/arrays/3D int array')

Or slices of variables:

slice = mg_h5_getdata(f, '/arrays/3D int array[3, 5:*:2, 0:49:3]')

Or attributes:

attr = mg_h5_getdata(f, '/images/Eskimo.CLASS')

Similarly, MG_H5_PUTDATA can create and edit variables in HDF 5 files, while MG_H5_DUMP prints a listing of the variables and attributes of a file.

I have adding corresponding routines for HDF 4, netCDF, and IDL Savefiles over the past few years. Since I have been dealing netCDF files more extensively recently, I have been adding to their routines, most notably I have created a LIST routine which provides an array of variable/attribute names available in a file.

Here’s the routines available in mglib currently:

Action HDF 4 HDF 5 netCDF Savefile
get data MG_HDF_GETDATA MG_H5_GETDATA MG_NC_GETDATA MG_SAVE_GETDATA
put data MG_HDF_PUTDATA MG_H5_PUTDATA MG_NC_PUTDATA
dump MG_HDF_DUMP MG_H5_DUMP MG_NC_DUMP MG_SAVE_DUMP
list MG_NC_LIST