Hi, in my experience numbers loaded from text files very often require identical conversion for all data (e.g. parsing Fortran-style double precision, or German vs. English decimals...). Yet loadtxt and genfromtxt in such cases require the user to construct a dictionary of converters for every single data column, a task that could be easily handled within the routines. I am therefore putting up a patch for testing that allows users to specify a default converter for all input data as "converters={-1: conv}" (or alternatively {'all': conv}, leaving that open to discussion). Please test the changeset (still lacking tests for the new option) at https://github.com/dhomeier/numpy/compare/master...iocnv-wildcard which also contains some bug fixes to handle complex input. Awaiting your comments, Derek