Hi all first, please forgive me for my ignorance - I am taking my first stumbling steps with numpy and scipy. I am having some difficulty with the behaviour of genfromtxt. s = SIO.StringIO("""1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6 7, 8, 9""") g= genfromtxt(s, delimiter=', ', dtype=None) print g[:,0] This produces the output I expected, a slice for column 0... array([1, 4, 7]) BUT.... s = SIO.StringIO("""a, 2, 3 b, 5, 6 c, 8, 9""") g= genfromtxt(s, delimiter=', ', dtype=None) g[:,0] Produces the following error: IndexError: invalid index .... In the first case, genfromtxt returns me a 2d array (list of lists), in the second it returns a list of tuples with an associated dtype list of tuples. How can I do my nice 2d slicing on the latter? array([('a', 2, 3), ('b', 5, 6), ('c', 8, 9)], dtype=[('f0', '|S1'), ('f1', '<i4'), ('f2', '<i4')]) thanks in advance for any assistance Matt