Rescue corrupt IDL .sav files to NetCDF or HDF5
IDL has been buggy in the past for writing .sav` files in the proprietary data format. One should instead save data to NetCDF4 or HDF5.
Read IDL .sav
files from Python:
from scipy.io import readsav
data = readsav('mydata.sav')
data
dict()
of IDL variables.
My Scipy contribution: IDL was able to read the .sav
file, so I wrote a one-off IDL script to convert from IDL .sav to NetCDF4 .NC: sav2nc.pro format.
I also have code there to convert from IDL .sav to HDF5.
I also successfully submitted a
patch to SciPy
to fix some of these IDL .sav
reading issues.