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matlab.io.hdf4.sd.setNBitDataSet

Namespace: matlab.io.hdf4.sd

Specify nonstandard bit length for dataset values

Syntax

setNBitDataSet(sdsID,startBit,bitlen,ext,fillone)

Description

setNBitDataSet(sdsID,startBit,bitlen,ext,fillone) specifies that the integer dataset identified by sdsID contains data of a non-standard length defined by startBit and bitlen.

Any length between 1 and 32 bits can be specified. After setNBitDataset has been called for the dataset array, any read or write operation will involve conversion between the new data length of the dataset array and the data length of the read or write buffer.

Bit lengths of all data types are counted from the right of the bit field starting with 0. In a bit field containing the values 01111011, bits 2 and 7 are set to 0 and all the other bits are set to 1. The least significant bit is bit 0.

The startBit parameter specifies the left-most position of the variable-length bit field to be written. For example, in the bit field described in the preceding paragraph a startBit parameter set to 4 would correspond to the fourth bit value of 1 from the right.

The parameter bitlen specifies the number of bits of the variable-length bit field to be written. This number includes the starting bit and the count proceeds toward the right end of the bit field - toward the lower-bit numbers. For example, starting at bit 5 and writing 4 bits of the bit field described in the preceding paragraph would result in the bit field 1110 being written to the dataset. This would correspond to a startBit value of 5 and a bitlen value of 4.

The parameter ext specifies whether to use the left-most bit of the variable-length bit field to sign-extend to the left-most bit of the dataset data. For example, if 9-bit signed integer data is extracted from bits 17-25 and the bit in position 25 is 1, then when the data is read back from disk, bits 26-31 will be set to 1. Otherwise bit 25 will be 0 and bits 26-31 will be set to 0. The ext parameter can be set to true (or 1) or false (or 0); specify true to sign-extend.

The parameter fillone specifies whether to fill the "background" bits with the value 1 or 0. This parameter is also set to either true (or 1) or false (or 0).

The "background" bits of a non-standard length dataset are the bits that fall outside of the non-standard length bit field stored on disk. For example, if five bits of an unsigned 16-bit integer dataset located in bits 5 to 9 are written to disk with the parameter fillone set to true (or 1), then when the data is reread into memory bits 0 to 4 and 10 to 15 would be set to 1. If the same 5-bit data was written with a fillone value of false (or 0), then bits 0 to 4 and 10 to 15 would be set to 0.

The operation on fillone is performed before the operation on ext. For example, using the ext example above, bits 0 to 16 and 26 to 31 will first be set to the background bit value, and then bits 26 to 31 will be set to 1 or 0 based on the value of the 25th bit.

This function corresponds to the SDsetnbitdataset in the HDF library C API.

Examples

import matlab.io.hdf4.*
sdID = sd.start('myfile.hdf','create');
sdsID = sd.create(sdID,'temperature','int32',[10 20]);
sd.setNBitDataSet(sdsID,6,4,0,0);
data = int32([1:200]);
data = reshape(data,10,20);
sd.writeData(sdsID,[0 0],data);
sd.endAccess(sdsID);
sd.close(sdID);