HDF5 for Python

The h5py package is a Pythonic interface to the HDF5 binary data format.

HDF5 is an open-source library and file format for storing large amounts of numerical data, originally developed at NCSA. It is widely used in the scientific community for everything from NASA’s Earth Observing System to the storage of data from laboratory experiments and simulations. Over the past few years, HDF5 has rapidly emerged as the de-facto standard technology in Python to store large numerical datasets.

This is the reference documentation for the h5py package. Check out the Quick Start Guide if you’re new to h5py and HDF5.

The lead author of h5py, Andrew Collette, also wrote an O’Reilly book which provides a comprehensive, example-based introduction to using Python and HDF5 together.

Getting h5py

Downloads are at http://www.h5py.org. It can be tricky to install all the C library dependencies for h5py, so check out the install guide first.

Getting help

Tutorial and reference documentation is available here at http://docs.h5py.org. We also have a mailing list at Google Groups. Anyone is welcome to post; the list is read by both users and the core developers of h5py.

Low-level API reference