Physicists use ROOT because that's what they know. The ROOT software stores its data in a ROOT file format that no other software can read. This is fine if you're only using the ROOT software, but physicists are the only people who use ROOT, and even physicists sometimes want to use something else. So wouldn't it be nice to convert ROOT files into a more standard format?

I wrote an example program for how to convert a ROOT file to HDF5, a more standard file format. The program expects a very particular dataset; it doesn't detect the schema of the dataset. Thus, it won't automatically convert arbitrary files. Instead, the script serves as a template for when you should need to do such a conversion.

First, install the dependencies. You need

• ROOT
• Python 2.7
• /usr/lib/root in your PYTHONPATH
• wget

On Arch Linux, you can just run.

make dep

Once you have the dependencies, this is how you download the datasets and run the demo.

make

The file that is running all of this is root2hdf5.py.