h5ify

Save Python dictionaries to HDF5 files, and load HDF5 files into Python dictionaries.

The dictionary can be a nested dictionary of dictionaries, the terminal values of which are numbers, lists/tuples of numbers, arrays, etc. If the value of a key is not another dictionary, it is stored as a Dataset in the HDF5 file, otherwise it creates a new Group.

The attrs key can be used at each level of a nested dictionary to store metadata for the corresponding Group objects in .attrs. This currently cannot be used to store .attrs metadata for Dataset objects. The value for each attrs key must be a dictionary that is not nested.

Install

pip install h5ify

Examples

Make a small dictionary, then save it.

import h5ify

d = {'x': 1.0, 'y': 2, 'z': [1, 2, 3], 'attrs': {'info': 'README example'}}
h5ify.save('tmp.h5', d)

Load the saved dictionary.

dd = h5ify.load('tmp.h5')
print(dd)

{'attrs': {'info': 'README example'}, 'x': 1.0, 'y': 2, 'z': array([1, 2, 3])}

Note that lists/tuple are converted to numpy arrays by h5py.

You can use the usual h5py API to open the stored HDF5 file.

import h5py

with h5py.File('tmp.h5', 'r') as f:
    for key, val in f.items():
        print(key, val[()])
    for key, val in f.attrs.items():
        print(key, val)

x 1.0
y 2
z [1 2 3]
info README example

h5ify opens HDF5 files in a mode, meaning "Read/write if exists, create otherwise". You cannot save a dictionary with the same file name and Dataset keys.

h5ify.save('tmp.h5', d)

ValueError: Unable to synchronously create dataset (name already exists)

You can append values that are not yet saved to the same file, however.

h5ify.save('tmp.h5', {'w': 42})
print(h5ify.load('tmp.h5'))

{'attrs': {'info': 'README example'}, 'w': 42, 'x': 1.0, 'y': 2, 'z': array([1, 2, 3])}

Any additional arguments or keyword arguments to h5ify.save are passed to the create_dataset function in h5py.

h5ify.save('tmp.h5', {'comp': [100]}, compression = 'gzip', compression_opts = 9)

That should cover it. Let me know if you have questions!