Re: Re: HDF/HDF5
I too am examining file formats. I have been evaluating HDF as well as
other formats. My recommendations:
HDF:
It appears that your data is rather simplistic and non-heirarchical.
There is no reason to use HDF unless you need to store the heirarchy of
your data.
Binary:
Since you have two flavors of data, you are going to need to define two
storage sets with some kind of header indicating whether the particular
set is unsigned or two's compliment. This would be a reasonable way to
go (and the simplest).
ASCII:
This is probably a better route. You will need to convert the raw
binary representation of the data into ascii and list the sets in
columns, which is very easy. However, if you are concerned about loss
of precision in the tranisition from machine representation to text,
then this is not the way to go, and I would recommend binary (this is a
very slight effect).
One last consideration is data longevity. If you want to be able to
rediscover your data in a couple years, it is going to be much more
transparent if you use an ascii format. With HDF or binary you will
find that you have an unintelligible mess of zeros and ones.
I could offer more assistance if I understood your intent for the data.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Mike Gilbert
Reply to: