[Numpy-discussion] Problem with concatenate and object arrays
Fernando Perez
Fernando.Perez at colorado.edu
Sun Sep 3 15:15:22 EDT 2006
Hi all,
I'm wondering if the following difference in behavior of object arrays should
be considered a bug. Let a and b be:
In [21]: a = [0,1]
In [22]: b = [ None, None]
If we concatenate a with an empty list, it works:
In [23]: numpy.concatenate(([],a))
Out[23]: array([0, 1])
But not so for b:
In [24]: numpy.concatenate(([],b))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
exceptions.ValueError Traceback (most recent
call last)
/home/fperez/<ipython console>
ValueError: 0-d arrays can't be concatenated
This behavior changed recently (it used to work with r2788), and I realize
it's probably part of all the reworkings of the object arrays which have been
discussed on the list, and all of whose details I have to admit I haven't
followed. But this behavior strikes me as a bit inconsistent, since
concatenation with a non-empty object array works fine:
In [26]: numpy.concatenate(([None],b))
Out[26]: array([None, None, None], dtype=object)
This is biting us in some code which keeps object arrays, because when
operations of the kind
N.concatenate((some_list_of_objects[:nn],other_object_array))
are taken and nn happens to be 0, the code just explodes. In our case, the
variable nn is a runtime computed quantity that comes from a numerical
algorithm, for which 0 is a perfectly reasonable value.
Are we just misusing things and is there a reasonable alternative, or should
this be considered a numpy bug? The r2788 behavior was certainly a lot less
surprising as far as our code was concerned.
I realize that one alternative is to wrap everything into arrays:
N.concatenate((N.asarray(some_list_of_objects[:nn]),other_object_array))
Is this the only solution moving forward, or could the previous behavior be
restored without breaking other areas of the new code/design?
Thanks for any input,
f
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