Introduction

Matlab provides both a high level and a low level interface to the Hdf5 library. Functions at the high level include h5read and h5write for reading and writing from hdf files. Many of our datasets are one dimensional arrays of a compound type. A compound type is a well defined concept in Hdf5, it is like a C struct. In hdfview (a useful tool for viewing hdf5 files provided by the hdf5 group) they often look like two dimensional arrays, but the columns are really the field names of the compound type. When you read a dataset in with h5read each field is separated into its own 1D array. For instance, if the dataset looks like

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