===  hdf5oct  ===

Copyright 2012 Tom Mullins


This is a library for GNU Octave for reading hdf5 files. At the moment it
provides only one function, modeled after Matlab's h5read, which can read
subsets of a dataset.  Octave's load function will attempt to read an entire
dataset, which for very large datasets is undesired. h5util's h5read function
does slightly better, reading only 2d slices of 3d datasets, but that's still
fairly limiting. This exposes libhdf5's H5Sselect_hyperslab in a way which
tries to be compatible with Matlab.

To install, just use "make" or "make all" or "make h5read.oct". Then move
h5read.oct somewhere where Octave will find it. You can try running h5test.m if
you want to see if it works. 

If anyone wants to take this code and put it in the Octave Forge, you're
welcome to. Especially if you want to add h5write, h5create, etc :). I may
write more of those in the future, but if someone else does it first I'd be
okay with that.

TODO:
-write h5write, h5create, h5writeatt, h5readattr, h5disp, and h5info. This may
 take some fairly major changes to H5File.
-maybe use hdf5's c++ interface instead of the c interace.
-write more comprehensive tests instead of a few random choices. Also test for
 error conditions.
-test with a chunked dataset with an unlimited dimension (should just work,
 though I haven't tried it)
-modify to follow "Octave conventions" if I ever find info on what those are.