On 3/15/06, Travis Oliphant
The dtype object does contain what you want. In fact. It's the fields attribute of the dtype object that is a dictionary accessed by field name. Thus, to see if a field is a valid field itdentifier,
if name in t.dtype.fields:
would work (well there is a slight problem in that -1 is a special key to the dictionary that returns a list of field names ordered by offset and so would work also), but if you now that name is already a string, then no problem.
Yes, I see, but I think you meant if name in t.dtype.fields.keys(): which contains the -1 as a key. In [275]: t.dtype.fields.keys: Out[275]: ('tag1','tag2',-1) So, since the last key points to the names, one can also do: In [279]: t.dtype.fields[-1] Out[279]: ('tag1', 'tag2') which is not transparent, but does what you need. For now, I'll probably just write a simple function to wrap this. Thanks, Erin