MATLAB Programming

Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5) Files
The H5T_IEEE_F32BE class name indicates the data is a 4-byte, big endian,
IEEE floating-point data type. (See the HDF5 specification for more
information about atomic data types.)
Mapping Composite Data Types. A composite data type is an aggregation
of one or more atomic data types. Composite data types include structures,
multidimensional arrays, and variable-length data types (one-dimensional
arrays).
If the data in the data set is stored in one of the HDF5 nonatomic data types
and the data cannot be represented in the workspace using a native MATLAB
data type,hdf5read uses one of a set of classes MATLAB defines to represent
HDF5 data types. The following figure illustrates the hdf5 class and its
subclasses. For more information about a specific class, see the sections that
follow. To learn more about the HDF5 data types in general, see the HDF Web
page at http://www.hdfgroup.org.
hdf5
h5array h5compound h5enum h5string
h5vlen
For example, if an HDF5 file contains a data set made up of an enumerated
data type which cannot be represented in MATLAB, hdf5read uses the HDF5
h5enum class to represent the data. An h5enum object has data members
that store the enumerations (text strings), their corresponding values, and
the enumerated data.
You might also need to use these HDF5 data type classes when using the
hdf5write function to write data from the MATLAB workspace to an HDF5
file. By default, hdf5write can convert most MATLAB data to appropriate
HDF5 data types. However, if this default data type mapping is not suitable,
you can create HDF5 data types directly.
7-19