I'm trying to use numpy to manipulate CSV file. I'm looking for feature similar to relational database. So I come across a class recarray that seems to meet my need. And then I see other references of structured array. Are these just different name of the same feature? Also I encounter a problem trying to access an field by attribute name. I have In [303]: arr = np.array([ .....: (1, 2.2, 0.0), .....: (3, 4.5, 0.0) .....: ], .....: dtype=[ .....: ('unit',int), .....: ('price',float), .....: ('amount',float), .....: ] .....: ) In [304]: data0 = arr.view(recarray) In [305]: data0.price[0] Out[305]: 2.2000000000000002 It works fine when I get a price vector and pick the first element of it. But if instead I select the first row and try to access its price attribute, it wouldn't work In [306]: data0[0].price --------------------------------------------------------------------------- AttributeError Traceback (most recent call last) c:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\numpy\<ipython console> in <module>() AttributeError: 'numpy.void' object has no attribute 'price' Then I come across an alternative way to build a recarray. In that case both usage work fine. In [307]: data1 = np.rec.fromarrays( .....: [[1,3],[2.2,4.5],[0.0,0.0]], .....: names='unit,price,amount') In [309]: data1.price[0] Out[309]: 2.2000000000000002 In [310]: data1[0].price Out[310]: 2.2000000000000002 What's going on here? Wai Yip