The HDFStore class is the pandas abstraction responsible for dealing with HDF5 data. Using random data, we will demonstrate this functionality.
Give the HDFStore constructor the path to a demo file and create a store:
filename = "pytable_df_demo.h5" store = pd.io.pytables.HDFStore(filename) print(store)
The preceding code snippet will print the file path to the store and its contents, which is empty at the moment:
<class 'pandas.io.pytables.HDFStore'>
File path: pytable_df_demo.h5
Empty
HDFStore has a dict-like interface, meaning that we can store values, such as, for instance, a pandas DataFrame with a corresponding lookup key. Store a DataFrame containing random data in HDFStore as follows:
store['df'] = df print(store)
Now the store contains data as illustrated in the following output:
<class 'pandas.io.pytables.HDFStore'>
File path: pytable_df_demo.h5
...