Storing a list of strings to a HDF5 Dataset from Python

Question

I am trying to store a variable length list of string to a HDF5 Dataset. The code for this is

import h5py h5File=h5py.File('xxx.h5','w') strList=['asas','asas','asas']   h5File.create_dataset('xxx',(len(strList),1),'S10',strList) h5File.flush()  h5File.Close()   

I am getting an error stating that "TypeError: No conversion path for dtype: dtype('&lt U3')" where the &lt means actual less than symbol
How can I solve this problem.

Answer 1

You're reading in Unicode strings, but specifying your datatype as ASCII. According to the h5py wiki, h5py does not currently support this conversion.

You'll need to encode the strings in a format h5py handles:

asciiList = [n.encode("ascii", "ignore") for n in strList] h5File.create_dataset('xxx', (len(asciiList),1),'S10', asciiList) 

Note: not everything encoded in UTF-8 can be encoded in ASCII!