Dear all,

people in my new lab are trying to convert me from matlab to python, and they may have a point: "import this" tells me that "Beautiful is better than ugly, Explicit is better than implicit, Simple is better than complex, Complex is better than complicated", etc, which most of us probably agree with. It also says that "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it, Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.", and since I'm dutch I should have the innate ability to know the obvious way to do things in python which makes life easier.

Anyway, I was wondering if there is a python library that supports reading and writing AFNI HEAD and BRIK files (and maybe even NIML, but that seems unlikely).

Approaches I'm currently aware of that may serve as a workaround are:
- the older pyNIFTI and newer NiBabel packages provide NIFTI I/O support
- AFNI can handle NIFTI files pretty well (although sometimes it has difficulties deciding which transformation to use if has both AFNI and original NIFTI attributes)
- 3dcopy can convert between AFNI and NIFTI formats.
- the AFNI matlab package supports reading and writing AFNI files (I made some minor contributions to this package)

Yet I'd like to know if there is a python package that can read and write AFNI files directly without AFNI or matlab.

Thanks,
Nick