Hi Jason & Quincey, >> The part that is currently problematic is that the buffer passed to the >> conversion routine does not have a vector of hvl_ts but rather a vector of >> some sort of internal hdf5 types.
I'm the original person who asked about this (I'm the main author of h5py). We have to convert from HDF5 vlen strings to an opaque object (a Python string). Since h5py has to deal with this behavior in released versions of HDF5 we implemented a workaround, which I briefly described in that thread: 1. Read from the dataset selection into a contiguous conversion buffer with exactly the same type as the dataset 2. Call H5Tconvert to go from the dataset type to your destination type. The correct data is supplied to the custom converter when you do this (for some reason) 3. Scatter the converted points from the buffer to your memory destination. This is kind of annoying because the gather/scatter process is time-intensive, and getting everything correct w.r.t backing buffers, etc. is a real headache. You can see our implementation here (in Cython): https://code.google.com/p/h5py/source/browse/h5py/_proxy.pyx (starts at line 102) I agree it would be great if this were fixed (in HDF5 1.10?). Along with identifier recycling, this is one of the biggest sources of pain in the h5py codebase. Parenthetically, are you aware of h5labview (http://sourceforge.net/p/h5labview)? Maybe you and Martijn could join forces. Andrew _______________________________________________ Hdf-forum is for HDF software users discussion. [email protected] http://mail.hdfgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/hdf-forum_hdfgroup.org
