On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 2:32 PM, Warren Weckesser <warren.weckesser@gmail.com> wrote:

Still, the case of dtype=None, name=None is problematic. Suppose I want genfromtxt() to detect the column names from the 1-st row and data types from the 3-rd. How would you do that?

This may sound like a cop out, but at some point, I stop trying to make genfromtxt() handle every possible case, and instead I would write a custom header reader to handle this.

In the abstract, I would agree with you. It is often the case that 2-3 lines of clear Python code is better than a terse function call with half a dozen non-obvious options. Specifically, I would be against the proposed slice_rows because it is either equivalent to genfromtxt(islice(..), ..) or hard to specify.

On the other hand, skip_rows is different for two reasons:

1. It is not a new option. It is currently a deprecated alias to skip_header, so a change is expected - either removal or redefinition.

2. The intended use-case - inferring column names and type information from a file where data is separated from the column names is hard to code explicitly. (Try it!)