[NeXus-committee] NeXus data file inspection tool. NeXus at ILL. We need to be more flexible.

[Pete Jemian]

Joachim:

On 9/2/2014 7:42 AM, Joachim Wuttke wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> enclosed I submit a short piece of software to your kind consideration:
> A script that reads a NeXus data file and writes a complete tree
> representation of the structure, plus contents, except for arrays
> (which are abbreviated to fit in one line) and repeating structures
> (which are replaced by links).


Your new tool joins two other Python tools that provide a tree view.

Are you aware of these?

* the tree API in NeXpy (http://nexpy.github.io/nexpy/)
* h5toText (part of http://spec2nexus.readthedocs.org)

Both are available on PyPI.  That means they can be installed in a 
Python distribution using either of these commands:

   easy_install spec2nexus
   easy_install nexpy

   pip install spec2nexus
   pip install nexpy

NeXpy's implementation of the tree API was designed for use on NeXus 
files.  It is likely to complain about structure in an HDF5 file that is 
not compliant with the NeXus standard (for example: the appearance of an 
HDF group with attribute NX_class="NXpete" since there is no such NeXus 
NXDL).

The h5toText tool is more relaxed in its aim - to show the structure of 
any HDF5 file.  If the file satisfies the minimum requirement (it has 
the class path: /NXentry/NXdata/{datafield}/@signal=1), then it is 
identified as a NeXus data file.  Try it on the ILL data file.  Read the 
documentation for the features available (such as displaying array data).

Pete