Hi Eric !

I have decided to use python & scipy for data evaluation/presentation for the future.

Excellent. Glad to hear it.

One thing that I did not find in scipy (maybe I did not look carefully enough) are commands for simple reading-in of ascii data from data files with simple contents like:

1 2 2 4 3 9 4 7 5 9 6 1

Nothing more than 2 simple blank-seperated vectors in two columns. I have tried it in pure python with the readline command an splitting the lines into the blank-sepatated elements, but I think it is not very elegant since it takes too many commands to do so. Reading in of data from an external file is such a very fundamental think in science that there should be a simple solution (imagine handling big data sets).

Do you see a possibility to make it easier ?

I agree this is important. Travis Oliphant's scipy.io package has a module called array_import that I think will do what you want. It was adapted from some of Konrad Hinsen's work. file: test.dat 1 2 2 4

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from scipy import * import scipy.io.array_import help(scipy.io.array_import.read_array)

read_array(fileobject, separator=None, columns=None, comment='#', lines=None, atype='d', linesep='\n', rowsize=10000, missing=0) Return an array containing the data from file |fileobject|.

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q = scipy.io.array_import.read_array('c:\\test.dat') q array([[ 1., 2.], [ 2., 4.]])

While this is available, I think it is buried way to deep in scipy. We need to pull the functionality up a level or two. As you say, this is a very common need and it should be made easily accessible. I also think it should be augmented to read from a string instead of just from a file -- although I guess this would need another name. The code for read_array is at the bottom of this file: http://scipy.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/scipy/io/array_import.py?rev=1.5&conten t-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup Also: There has been a short discussion about the merits of MS Excel (which counts me as a user) on the scipy-dev list, and this is one of the things it does extremely well. It has an import capability that lets you split data in a fixed format or character delimited way. Whenever I need a quick and dirty plot of data in a file, I always reach for Excel to do this. It'd be nice to have something similar to Excel's import wizard available to those who like that sort of thing. For now, read_array will work quite nicely. see ya, eric