The HDF5 interface for R

This package provides a simple interface between The R language and the HDF5 libaries. It allows R to write out data in HDF5 format and allows it to read in many (but not all) of the files in HDF5 format which you might encounter.

The package was written by Marcus Daniels, but I have contributed to it a couple of times. You can always get the current approved version from CRAN. If, however, you want to try my latest bleeding-edge effort you may find it in this directory. DISCLAIMER: that file may be broken, may be different from last time you downloaded it (even if the version number hasn't changed), may be different from a file with the same version number released by another maintainer, may fail to install, may cause demons to fly out of your nose etc etc.

There are a number of caveats about this package and a number of things which need work:

• The packages still uses the old (v1.6) version of the HDF5 interface. It will still work with the latest (1.8) version of the HDF5 libraries but only if the HDF5 libraries were built with the old interface enabled.
• The package will not read data which is stored in compound datatypes.
• The package will not read data which is stored as type H5T_ENUM.
• The package reads in all of an HDF5 file in one go. It would be desirable to add the ability to read individual datasets.
• Apologies, but I know very little about the intricacies of getting R packages to build on Windows. I am grateful for any help that R/Windows experts can give me in this area.

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