On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:14 PM, Pierre GM pgmdevlist@gmail.com wrote:
The problem you have is that the default dtype is 'float' (for backwards compatibility w/ the original np.loadtxt). What you want is to automatically change the dtype according to the content of your file: you should use dtype=None
r = loadtxt(sys.argv[1], delimiter=',', names=True, dtype=None)
As you'll want a recarray, we could make a np.records.loadtxt function where dtype=None would be the default...
As you'll want a recarray, we could make a np.records.loadtxt function where dtype=None would be the default...
OK, that worked great. I do think some a default impl in np.rec which returned a recarray would be nice. It might also be nice to have a method like np.rec.fromcsv which defaults to a delimiter=',', names=True and dtype=None. Since csv is one of the most common data interchange format in the world, it would be nice to have some obvious function that works with it with little or no customization required.
Fernando and I have taught a scientific computing course on a number of occasions, and on the last round we taught to undergrads. Most of these students have little or no programming, for many the concept of an array is something they struggle with, dtypes are a difficult concept, but we found that they responded very well to our csv2rec example, because with no syntactic cruft they were able to load a file and do some stats on the columns, and I would like to see that ease of use preserved.
JDH