[Nexus] nullpad vs. nullterm strings

[Tobias.Richter at diamond.ac.uk]

Hi Paul,

That seems very sensible. I've hit that problem before as well but didn't investigate further.
Please put that in.

Thanks,

Tobias

________________________________________
From: nexus-bounces at nexusformat.org [nexus-bounces at nexusformat.org] on behalf of Paul Kienzle [paul.kienzle at nist.gov]
Sent: 20 March 2013 16:28
To: nexus at nexusformat.org
Subject: [Nexus] nullpad vs. nullterm strings

Hi,

I'm trying to use h5py to create NeXus files at the NCNR, but I'm running into the problem that h5py creates strings using

    H5T_STR_NULLPAD

but napi expects strings created using

    H5T_STR_NULLTERM

The effect is that the strings I create in h5py have the final character chopped off when I view them using napi.

I spent some time trying to get h5py to produce NULLTERM strings from the high level interface, but no luck so far.

There are a couple of workarounds, like making string fields one character longer or making them variable width, but that's just wrong.

Easiest would be to fix napi5.c so that it respects the stored string format.  Right now the code looks like:

     else if (tclass==H5T_STRING)
     {
        len = H5Tget_size(pFile->iCurrentT);
        memtype_id = H5Tcopy(H5T_C_S1);
        H5Tset_size(memtype_id, len);
        status = H5Dread (pFile->iCurrentD, memtype_id,
                       H5S_ALL, H5S_ALL,H5P_DEFAULT, data);
        H5Tclose(memtype_id);
     }
     else
     {
       memtype_id = h5MemType(pFile->iCurrentT);
       status = H5Dread (pFile->iCurrentD, memtype_id,
                       H5S_ALL, H5S_ALL,H5P_DEFAULT, data);
     }

NX5getattr doesn't have this problem because it uses H5Aget_type. Since pFile->iCurrentT already contains H5Dget_type, we can just use it directly.  This simplifies the code to:

     …
     else if (tclass==H5T_STRING)
     {
        status = H5Dread (pFile->iCurrentD, pFile->iCurrentT,
                       H5S_ALL, H5S_ALL,H5P_DEFAULT, data);
     }
     …

A similar change is needed for getslab, though it's looks like napi doesn't support getslab on n-d string arrays, so it doesn't matter.

Any objections to pushing this change?

  - Paul


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