[Nexus] [Hdf-forum] Detecting netCDF versus HDF5 -- PROPOSED SOLUTIONS --REQUEST FOR COMMENTS

[Pete Jemian]

This method is not robust to identify an HDF5 file as NeXus.

On 2016-04-21 1:15 PM, Pedro Vicente wrote:
 > NeXus just writes some metadata (attributes) on top of the HDF5 API,
 > that has some special meaning for the NeXus community
...
 > This is what Nexus uses.
 > A Nexus file on creation writes several attributes on the root group,
 > like "NeXus_version" and other numeric data.
 > This is done using the public HDF5 API calls.

NeXus does not require these attributes and there are NeXus HDF5 data 
files that have been written by software other than the NAPI.  A more 
robust (still incomplete) test would be to identify at least one 
root-level group with an attribute NX_class="NXentry".

Pete

-- 
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Pete R. Jemian, Ph.D.                <jemian at anl.gov>
Beam line Controls and Data Acquisition, Group Leader
Advanced Photon Source,   Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL  60439                   630 - 252 - 3189
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    Education is the one thing for which people
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