Hi Will,

To force an iteration to run along certain axes, I believe you should be using `op_axes`. Your diagnosis is correct that `external_loop` is trying to help you be more optimal, since it's purpose is exactly that: optimization.

Unfortunately, if you use `op_axes` you'll run into https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/9808.

Eric

On Tue, 19 May 2020 at 00:42, William Ayd <william.ayd@icloud.com> wrote:
I am trying to use the nditer to traverse each column of a 2D array, returning the column as a 1D array. Consulting the docs, I found this example which works perfectly fine:

In [65]: a = np.arange(6).reshape(2,3)                                                                                                                             

In [66]: for x in np.nditer(a, flags=['external_loop'], order='F'): 
    ...:     print(x, end=' '
    ...:                                                                                                                                                           
[0 3] [1 4] [2 5] 

When changing the shape of the input array to (1, 3) however, this doesn’t yield what I am hoping for any more (essentially [0], [1] [2]):

In [68]: for x in np.nditer(a, flags=['external_loop'], order='F'): 
    ...:     print(x, end=' '
    ...:                                                                                                                                                           
[0 1 2] 

I suspect this may have to do with the fact that the (1, 3) array is both C and F contiguous, and it is trying to return as large of a 1D F-contiguous array as it can. However, I didn’t see any way to really force it to go by columns. My best guess was the itershape argument though I couldn’t figure out how to get that to work and didn’t see much in the documentation.

Thanks in advance for the help!

- Will



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