title: HDF5 writing a string header to a file
body: <p>I am trying to write an HDF5 file from C++. The file basically contains a large timeseries matrix in the following format</p>
  
  <pre><code>TimeStamp    Property1      Property2
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have managed to write the data successfully, I created a dset and used the H5Dwrite function. </p>
  
  <p>Now my question is how do I create a file header, in other words, if I want to write the following array to the file...</p>
  
  <p>['TimeStamp', 'Property1', 'Property2'] </p>
  
  <p>...and tag it to the columns for ease of later use ( I am planning to analyze the matrix in Python). How to do that?</p>
  
  <p>I tried to use H5Dwrite to write a string array but failed, I guess it wanted consistent datatypes, so it just wanted floats, which is the datatype for my data. Then I read about this metadata thing, but I am a bit lost as to how to use it? Any help would be much appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>A related side question is can the first row of a matrix be a string and the others rows contain doubles?</p>