Overview

Table of Contents

• Motivating example
• Where to start?

‍This is the homepage of TRIQS/h5 v1.3.0. The source code can be found on GitHub.

h5 provides a high-level C++ interface to the HDF5 library.

The main purpose of the library is to simplify the most common tasks like creating/opening/closing HDF5 files/groups/datasets/dataspaces or writing/reading data to/from HDF5 files.

More specifically, h5

• provides classes representing general HDF5 objects, like files, groups, etc.,
• provides read and write functions for various STL container types,
• provides a generic array interface to store and load multi-dimensional arrays,
• takes an RAII approach to manage reference counting and
• comes with Python bindings.

h5 only implements a small subset of the functionality provided by the HDF5 library. For more advanced tasks, the user can always resort to the underlying HDF5 C-implementation.

Motivating example

Storing and loading a vector of strings and a vector of doubles is as easy as

#include <h5/h5.hpp>
#include <string>
#include <vector>
 
int main(){
 
  {
    // Open file in write mode
    h5::file file("vec.h5", 'w');
 
    std::vector<std::string> vecs = {"a", "b"};
    std::vector<double> vecd      = {1.0, 2.0};
 
    h5::write(file, "vecs", vecs);
    h5::write(file, "vecd", vecd);
 
  } // Close file
 
  {
    // Open file in read mode
    h5::file file("vec.h5", 'r');
 
    std::vector<std::string> vecs;
    std::vector<double> vecd;
 
    h5::read(file, "vecs", vecs);
    h5::read(file, "vecd", vecd);
 
  } // Close file
}

This example will generate an HDF5 file vec.h5 with two datasets in the root "/" group:

$ h5dump vec.h5
 
HDF5 "vec.h5" {
GROUP "/" {
   DATASET "vecd" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_IEEE_F64LE
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( 2 ) / ( 2 ) }
      DATA {
      (0): 1, 2
      }
   }
   DATASET "vecs" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
         STRSIZE 2;
         STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLTERM;
         CSET H5T_CSET_UTF8;
         CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
      }
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( 2 ) / ( 2 ) }
      DATA {
      (0): "a", "b"
      }
   }
}
}

Where to start?

The Installation section tells you how to get the library and make it available on your system.

Integration in C++ projects explains how to integrate h5 in your own C++ code.

Then, you can start with the Examples section to get an overview of the library's features and how it can simplify basic HDF5 tasks.

Furthermore, we provide a detailed reference API Documentation to answer your questions.

If you experience any problem with the library, you can post an Issue on GitHub.