Saving from pickle.dumps to h5py

Saving a chunk of pickled data to a h5py dataset with following code result in “ValueError: VLEN strings do not support embedded NULLs”.

a = [1,2,3,4,5]
with h5py.File('test.h5','a') as f:
	f['a'] = pickle.dumps(a)

This can be worked around with, e.g., “np.string_”:

a = [1,2,3,4,5]
with h5py.File('test.h5','a') as f:
	f['a'] = np.string_(pickle.dumps(a))

To load it back:

with h5py.File('test.h5','r') as f:
	a = pickle.loads(f['a'][()])

I am not aware if there is any problem with this approach.