Y'all, Just a quick word before disappearing again: genfromtxt was designed to support files that don't have a well-defined structure (eg, the number and format of the column is unknown, some entries may be missing, and so forth). That was initially just an improved rec2csv from matplotlib back then, which eventually got rewritten a lot. On the other hand, loadtxt was designed to support the simpler case of well-structred files (you know the number of columns beforehand, you know their type...). It's simpler, but also far faster than genfromtxt, and it should stay like that. Missing values (and I'm talking about empty "cells") should not be covered by loadtxt, that's a job for genfromtxt: just raise an exception asking the user to try with another function. Anyhow, sorry for not being responsive, I don't have much time to work on numpy these days (which saddens me but pays my bills) but don't hesitate to contact me if there's a real issue somewhere. P.