Added function to convert list of strings into a np.array of bytes. This is useful to create list-valued attributes in HDF5.

src/metadata_review_lib.py

@@ -204,6 +204,18 @@ def parse_attribute(attr_value):
 
     return new_attr_value
 
+def convert_string_to_bytes(input_list: list):
+    utf8_type = lambda max_length: h5py.string_dtype('utf-8', max_length)
+    if input_list:
+        max_length = max(len(item) for item in input_list)
+        # Convert the strings to bytes with utf-8 encoding, specifying errors='ignore' to skip characters that cannot be encoded
+        input_list_bytes = [item.encode('utf-8', errors='ignore') for item in input_list]
+        input_array_bytes  = np.array(input_list_bytes,dtype=utf8_type(max_length)) 
+    else:
+        input_array_bytes  = np.array([],dtype=utf8_type(0))
+
+    return input_array_bytes
+
 def third_update_hdf5_file_with_review(input_hdf5_file, yaml_review_file, reviewer_attrs = {}, hdf5_upload : bool = False):
 
     """Third"""