Supported Formats

scitex-io supports 30+ file formats out of the box. Format is determined automatically from the file extension.

Format Table

Table 1. Built-in formats. All formats use the same save()/load() API.

Category	Extensions	Save	Load	Backend
Spreadsheet	.csv, .tsv	Yes	Yes	pandas
Excel	.xlsx, .xls	Yes	Yes	openpyxl / xlrd
NumPy	.npy, .npz	Yes	Yes	numpy
HDF5	.hdf5, .h5	Yes	Yes	h5py
Zarr	.zarr	Yes	Yes	zarr
MATLAB	.mat	Yes	Yes	scipy.io
Pickle	.pkl, .pickle, .pkl.gz	Yes	Yes	pickle / gzip
Joblib	.joblib	Yes	Yes	joblib
PyTorch	.pth, .pt	Yes	Yes	torch
CatBoost	.cbm	Yes	Yes	catboost
JSON	.json	Yes	Yes	json (stdlib)
YAML	.yaml, .yml	Yes	Yes	PyYAML
Text	.txt, .md	Yes	Yes	built-in open()
PDF	.pdf	No	Yes	pdfplumber / PyPDF2
Word	.docx	No	Yes	python-docx
Images	.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .tiff, .tif, .svg	Yes	Yes	PIL / matplotlib
Video	.mp4	Yes	No	matplotlib.animation
HTML	.html	Yes	No	built-in
LaTeX	.tex	Yes	No	built-in
BibTeX	.bib	Yes	Yes	bibtexparser
SQLite	.sqlite3, .db	No	Yes	sqlite3 (stdlib)
XML	.xml	No	Yes	xml.etree (stdlib)
Optuna	(study objects)	Yes	Yes	optuna
EEG	.con	No	Yes	mne

Two-Tier Registry

┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│           Format Lookup Order             │
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  1. User-registered handlers  (priority) │
│  2. Built-in handlers         (fallback) │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘

User handlers always take precedence. This means you can:

• Override a built-in format (e.g., use a custom CSV parser)

• Extend with new formats (e.g., .parquet, .feather)

• Swap backends without changing calling code

Optional Dependencies

Not all backends are installed by default. If a format’s backend is missing, save()/load() will raise an ImportError with installation instructions.

>>> load("data.hdf5")
ImportError: h5py is required for HDF5 support.
Install with: pip install h5py