[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] arrays from text?

[Jim Phillips]

Hi,

Is there a way to (quickly) generate an array of numbers from an array of  
their string representations?  More specifically, if I have an array a of Char  
in which each row contains a printed representation of a Float, is there a  
faster way to get an array of Floats than the following?

array(map(lambda b: string.atof(b.tostring()), a))

Wouldn't it be nice if there were?  ;-)

Even better would be the ability to use the equivalent of FORTRAN format  
statements and implicit loops to read in several arrays of different types  
simultaneously from either a Char array or a file.  Anyone know how hard this  
would be to do?

Of course, the reason for doing this is that with array operations as fast as  
they are, the bottleneck in many programs will be the time needed to read in  
text files, which won't be any faster.

-Jim Phillips
 jim@ks.uiuc.edu

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