h5_str: Display the Structure of an HDF5 Object

In h5lite: Simplified 'HDF5' Interface

Display the Structure of an HDF5 Object

Description

Recursively prints a summary of an HDF5 group or dataset, similar to the structure of h5ls -r. It displays the nested structure, object types, dimensions, and attributes.

Usage

h5_str(file, name = "/", attrs = TRUE, members = TRUE, markup = interactive())

Arguments

file	The path to the HDF5 file.
name	The name of the group or dataset to display. Defaults to the root group "/".
attrs	Set to FALSE to hide attributes. The default (TRUE) shows attributes prefixed with @.
members	Set to FALSE to hide compound dataset members. The default (TRUE) shows members prefixed with $.
markup	Set to FALSE to remove colors and italics from the output.

Details

This function provides a quick and convenient way to inspect the contents of an HDF5 file. It performs a recursive traversal of the file from the C-level and prints a formatted summary to the R console.

This function does not read any data into R. It only inspects the metadata (names, types, dimensions) of the objects in the file, making it fast and memory-safe for arbitrarily large files.

Value

This function is called for its side-effect of printing to the console and returns NULL invisibly.

See Also

h5_ls(), h5_attr_names()

Examples

file <- tempfile(fileext = ".h5")
h5_write(list(x = 1:10, y = matrix(1:9, 3, 3)), file, "group")
h5_write("metadata", file, "group", attr = "info")

# Print structure
h5_str(file)

unlink(file)

h5lite documentation built on May 19, 2026, 1:07 a.m.