nxarray

A software package for NeXus/HDF5 conversion from and to Python xarray.

nxarray extends xarray DataArrays and Datasets with a high-level python interface for NeXus/HDF5 file input and output.

Motivations

xarray is the most used Python package for labeled multi-dimensional data handling, providing convenient data structures (namely DataArrays and Datasets) and including a large library of functions for advanced analytics and visualization with these data structures.

Despite xarray supports natively import/export of HDF5 (a file format designed to efficiently store and organize large amount of data), it does not provide an integrated interface to the NeXus file format, the standard de facto for scientific data storage, based on HDF5 and increasingly adopted in laboratories and large-scale facilities all over the world.

With this respect, the nxarray package comes into play, bridging xarray with the NeXus format. This package actually extends xarray, providing convenient loading and saving methods for NeXus files, directly to Datasets objects. The architecture of a NeXus file resembles the structure of an xarray Dataset, and indeed both of them are specifically designed for handling scientific data with its relevant metadata.

nxarray is part of the reScipy project.

Feedback

Please report any feedback, bugs, or feature requests by opening an issue on the issue tracker of the code repository. You should provide as much information as possible to reproduce the problem, and details of your desiderata.