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[Feature]: Support for remote paths in `pynwb.read_nwb`

Open rly opened this issue 3 weeks ago • 2 comments

What would you like to see added to PyNWB?

Follow up to #1974.

Add support for remote paths in pynwb.read_nwb which requires a change to NWBHDF5IO.can_read. This should be doable. We may want to change can_read to return the read h5py object so that we are creating two h5py objects - one in can_read and one in read_nwb.

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Trying to simplify how users open NWB files across backends and data sources

What solution would you like?

See above

Do you have any interest in helping implement the feature?

Yes.

Code of Conduct

rly avatar Dec 11 '25 00:12 rly

Note the original inspiration from good ol' NWB Inspector had this: https://github.com/NeurodataWithoutBorders/nwbinspector/blob/4dda364954afd1faaaf846aed8863572c39f0627/src/nwbinspector/tools/_read_nwbfile.py#L136

CodyCBakerPhD avatar Dec 12 '25 16:12 CodyCBakerPhD

SpikeInterface also has some sophisticated tooling for this: https://github.com/SpikeInterface/spikeinterface/blob/main/src/spikeinterface/extractors/nwbextractors.py#L20

CodyCBakerPhD avatar Dec 14 '25 04:12 CodyCBakerPhD