I thought this was because the EOL was wrong, It seems the file has '\r' as the line ending (this may be wrong) anyway I changed it to '\n' and it works fine. I am told (on the pystatsmodels mailing list) that this is actually because the file is in unicode and that genfromtxt does not read the EOL correctly.

To me it is a bug because one might expect a user to what to save a file from excel and read it using genfromtxt. And for useres with little experience the problem is not obvious.

datatype = [('date','|S9'),('gpd','i8'),('temp','i8' ('precip','f16')]
data = np.genfromtxt('waterdata.csv', delimiter=',', skip_header=1, dtype=datatype)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Applications/WingIDE.app/Contents/MacOS/src/debug/tserver/_sandbox.py", line 1, in <module>
# Used internally for debug sandbox under external interpreter
File "/Library/Frameworks/EPD64.framework/Versions/6.1/lib/python2.6/site-packages/numpy/lib/io.py", line 1048, in genfromtxt

raise IOError('End-of-file reached before encountering data.')
IOError: End-of-file reached before encountering data.

THIS DOES NOT WORK

>>> s = file('data_with_CR.csv','r')

>>> data = np.genfromtxt(s, delimiter=",", skip_header=1, dtype=None)

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

File "/Library/Frameworks/EPD64.framework/Versions/6.1/lib/python2.6/site-packages/numpy/lib/io.py", line 1048, in genfromtxt

raise IOError('End-of-file reached before encountering data.')

IOError: End-of-file reached before encountering data.

>>> data = np.genfromtxt(s, delimiter=",", , dtype=None)

File "<stdin>", line 1

data = np.genfromtxt(s, delimiter=",", , dtype=None)

>>> s = file('data_with_CR.csv','U')

>>> data = np.genfromtxt(s, delimiter=",", skip_header=1, dtype=None)

>>> data

array([('1/1/00', 8021472, 52, 0.02),

('1/2/00', 9496016, 46, 0.059999999999999998),

('1/3/00', 8478792, 29, 0.0), ..., ('12/29/02', 10790000, 61, 0.0),

('12/30/02', 9501000, 44, 0.0), ('12/31/02', 9288000, 53, 0.0)],

dtype=[('f0', '|S8'), ('f1', '<i8'), ('f2', '<i8'), ('f3', '<f8')])