no worries,  I have not done much work on this.  As I am not sure what is needed.  

as for the dtypes, I used dictReader from the csv module.  Ordering does not matter but you need to have specific dtypes.  There is no way to get around this limitation without completely re-engineering strings in numpy.   In other words, without converting the dtypes, you have python objects in the underlying numpy objects and cannot be appended to usable hdf5 files.