Reading a string from hdf5 in C++

Question

I am reading in datasets from a H5 file in Microsoft Visual C++ 2008. Everything works fine for data of type int and double but I run into problems when I come across string

Answer 1

The HDF5 C++ API is woefully under-documented. This is how I read in strings from a dataset. I only figured this out with the help of a code-completion IDE:

using namespace H5;
std::string field_name("name of the field");
StrType datatype(0, H5T_VARIABLE);
DataSpace dataspace(H5S_SCALAR);
DataSet datset = group.openDataSet(field_name);

std::string field_value;
datset.read(field_value, datatype, dataspace);