support MATLAB tables

[jebej]

Currently, tables seem not to be supported, giving an error when read:

ERROR: KeyError: key "table" not found

here

MAT.jl/src/MAT_HDF5.jl

Line 176 in 7d67154

T = str2type_matlab[mattype]

[jebej]

Any idea on how this could be supported?

A NamedTuple of arrays could be a good julia equivalent, but I'm not sure how to handle this on the HDF5 side.

[timholy]

I haven't followed carefully, but there are two competing PRs (each with its own advantages) over at HDF5:

• Add h5read_compound to read compound structures efficiently HDF5.jl#559
• improve performance/ergonomics of reading compound datatypes HDF5.jl#592

[matthijscox]

MAT v0.11 supports table reading, including optional DataFrame conversion via Tables.jl:

using MAT, DataFrames
filepath = abspath(pkgdir(MAT), "./test/v7.3/struct_table_datetime.mat")
vars = matread(filepath; table = DataFrame)
vars["s"]["testTable"]

# outputs

3×5 DataFrame
 Row │ FlightNum  Customer  Date                 Rating  Comment
     │ Float64    String    DateTime             String  String
─────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1 │    1261.0  Jones     2016-12-20T00:00:00  Good    Flight left on time, not crowded
   2 │     547.0  Brown     2016-12-21T00:00:00  Poor    Late departure, ran out of dinne…
   3 │    3489.0  Smith     2016-12-22T00:00:00  Fair    Late, but only by half an hour. …