Thanks Sebastian. Casting it to an array would certainly help. Another oddity of zero-ranked scalars is that they look iterable, but in fact are not. Because all they do is generate an error.

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a = np.array(22)

Test if iterable:

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hasattr(a, __iter__) True

Or:

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import collections isinstance(a, collections.Iterable) True

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for e in a: print e TypeError: iteration over a 0-d array

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if a.shape:

Wouldn't it be better to have a different type altogether for numpy scalars? Because scalars don't seem to quack quite like arrays... (I haven't been following the discussion around scalars, so if this is a silly remark just ignore it) Another question. What would be the preferred method of testing for zero-ranked array? Something like this? print "array" else: print "scalar" Regards, Wim