MATLAB Programming

Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5) Files
By examining the structures at each level of the hierarchy, you can traverse
the entire file. The following figure describes the complete hierarchical
organization of the sample file example.h5.
Hierarchical Structure of example.h5 HDF5 File
Importing Data from an HDF5 File
To read data or metadata from an HDF5 file, use the hdf5read function. As
arguments, you must specify the name of the HDF5 file and the name of
the data set or attribute. Alternatively, you can specify just the field in the
structure returned by hdf5info that contains the name of the data set or
attribute; hdf5read can determine the file name from the Filename field in
the structure. For more information about finding the name of a data set or
attribute in an HDF5 file, see “Determining the Contents of an HDF5 File”
on page 7-12.
To illustrate, this example reads the data set, /g2/dset2.1 from the HDF5
sample file example.h5.
data = hdf5read('example.h5','/g2/dset2.1');
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