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Closing as duplicate of #2916. Eventually this will be fixed by datatree

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I hacked a quick solution for exploring HDF5 files that might be of interest. import h5py def explore_file(filepath,show="arrays"): """ View the internal structure of an HDF5 file Returns a dictionary of the entity names & representations of their values Arguments: filepath: string show: one of ('groups','arrays','all') groups: display the number of direct array-type members of each group/subgroup arrays: display the shape & dtype of each array (if not a scalar) all: display the shape & dtype of every array """ with h5py.File(filepath,mode='r') as f: descriptions = {} if show=="groups": def visitor(k,v): if isinstance(v, h5py.Group): arrays = [k for k in v.keys() if isinstance(v[k],h5py.Dataset)] if len(arrays) >0: descriptions[k] = len(arrays) elif show == "arrays": def visitor(k,v): if isinstance(v,h5py.Dataset) and len(v.shape)>0: descriptions[k] = "{},{}".format(v.shape,v.dtype) elif show =="all": def visitor(k,v): if isinstance(v,h5py.Dataset): descriptions[k] = "{},{}".format(v.shape,v.dtype) f.visititems(visitor)#Apply names.append to each name in the file return descriptions

This has come up a couple of times before -- please see https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/2916 and https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/1092.

The basic issue is that xarray.Dataset doesn't have any notion of a group in it, so it isn't clear how we could work in xarray.

If it's just a matter of listing groups that can be found in a file, it seems like netCDF4 works fine for that.