From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Sat Jan 15 12:18:16 2000
Subject: Unidentified subject!
From: stevenj at gil-galad dot mit dot edu
To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Cc: s dot cloherty at gsbme dot unsw dot edu dot au
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 13:20:03 -0500 (EST)

Shaun Cloherty wrote:
>I'm writing a modeling application, and would like to be able to dump
>state information to a binary file, either in Matlab format or native
>Octave binary format, so I can later load it into Octave for analysis.

You might alternatively consider writing your data in HDF5 format, a free,
portable binary format and supporting library by NCSA (hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu).
I have written an Octave plug-in to import individual HDF5 datasets, and
have also posted a patch that allows Octave to use HDF5 as a native file
format (see h5read.oct at http://ab-initio.mit.edu/mpb/hdf.html).

HDF5 has the advantages of being well-documented and designed to be called
by a user, and also of being a standard format readable by many other
tools.

Cordially,
Steven G. Johnson

PS. JWE, any news on incorporating my patch into Octave?

PPS. The code to write the Octave binary format, and the documentation for
it, is scattered in octave/src/load-save.cc if you would still rather use
that.



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