Hi,
I have h5 files that I get from some software that I’m reading through the h5py package (which makes life much easier!). In the files I read it seems that all attributes that are strings are written as ascii data so when I read them with h5py, they are byte strings. Not a huge deals as I can do string.decode('utf8') to get a python string, so that’s what I’ve done everywhere I read the attributes.
However, I’m now at the stage I want to edit some of these attributes in the hdf5 file with h5py before sending them back to the original software but I’m unable to write the attributes as byte strings. I’ve tried a few things:
file['data_group'].attrs['title'] = data.encode('utf-8')
and
file['data_group'].attrs['title'] = bytes(data.encode('utf-8'))
but both of these write a standard string, not a byte string, so it’s not read by the original software. Reading the file back with h5py I also find that the attribute I’ve just changed is not a byte string anymore as i no longer need to decode it before use.
How should I write the string so that I match the original files format?
