h5cat is a Python script to quickly preview the contents of an HDF5 file. It is designed to be used in situations where hdfview is overkill. It is distributed under the open-source MIT license.

See the excellent h5glance for a more modern replacement:

https://pypi.org/project/h5glance/#description

• Python 2.7, 3.5+
• numpy (<2.0)
• h5py (<3.0)

All of the above are included in the Enthought Python Distribution, so I would recommend you just install that if you can. argparse is required if you are on Python 2.6 (but it is built in with 2.7).

pip install h5cat

Run h5cat -h for a helpful message.

Here are a couple of examples to get you started.

By default, h5cat gives you the shape and type of every dataset in an HDF5 file.

$ h5cat single-channel-tr[0-3]-0-0.00.lzf.h5
>>> single-channel-tr1-0-0.00.lzf.h5

    stack
      shape:  (250, 250, 250) 
      type:  int32

    vi
      shape:  (3, 1) 
      type:  float64
>>> single-channel-tr2-0-0.00.lzf.h5

    stack
      shape:  (250, 250, 250) 
      type:  int32

    vi
      shape:  (3, 1) 
      type:  float64
>>> single-channel-tr3-0-0.00.lzf.h5

    stack
      shape:  (250, 250, 250) 
      type:  int32

    vi
      shape:  (3, 1) 
      type:  float64

If you want more details, use -v or --verbose to get a printout of the array. For large arrays this will be ...ed to show only the edges of the array as can be fit on screen. Use -g or --group to display only a specific group of the .h5 file.

$ h5cat -v -g vi single-channel-tr3-0-0.00.lzf.h5
>>> single-channel-tr3-0-0.00.lzf.h5

    vi
      shape:  (3, 1) 
      type:  float64
[[ 0.        ]
 [ 0.06224902]
 [ 2.23062383]]