IFiles

The name "IFile" is short for "Internal File", and is meant to refer to a Dataset inside an HDF-5 file that behaves just like a file in the user's file system. The idea behind this is to make it easy to create text files or binary files with almost the exact smae code as one would use for disk files, but instead create them as part of the object hierarchy inside the HDF file. Such files can be used in a variety of ways. So far, it has been used to create Metadata files, and also relational database files that are used with the sqlite3 database program, and its related spatialite spatial-relational databse program, both open-source. Analogs to each of the C file-access functions have been written in order to make porting such codes as easy as possible:

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