Hi all- I'm new to numpy and I'm slowly weening myself off of IDL. So far the experience has been very positive. I use recarrays a lot. I often read these recarrays from fits files using pyfits (modified to work with numpy). I find myself doing the following more than I would like: if 'TAG' in rec._coldefs.names: .... It seems messy to be accessing this "hidden" attribute in this way. Is there a plan to add methods to more transparently do such things? e.g. def fieldnames(): return _coldefs.names def field_exists(fieldname): return fieldname.upper() in _coldefs.names def field_index(fieldname): if field_exists(fieldname): return _coldefs.names.index(fieldname.upper()) else: return -1 # or None maybe Thanks, Erin