Opaque Datasets

It is possible to create datasets with opaque datatypes in HDF5. These are datasets where the data is stored as a sequence of bytes, with no interpretation of those bytes. This is not a commonly used feature of HDF5, but it is used in some applications. The h5py package supports reading and writing opaque datatypes, and so pyfive also supports reading them.

This implementation has only been tested for opaque datatypes that were created using h5py.

Such opaque datatypes will be transparently read into the same type of numpy array as was used to write the data. The users should not need to do anything special to read the data - but may need to do something special with the data to interpret it once read.