[Numpy-discussion] Slicing without a priori knowledge of dimension

[Hoyt Koepke]

Try using slice (python builtin) to create slice objects (what is
created implicitly by :5, 1:20, etc.).  slice takes the same arguments
as range.  A list of these (7 in your case) can then be passed to
A[...] as a tuple.

That's how I would do it, but maybe someone else has a better idea or
can correct me.

--Hoyt


On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 4:02 PM, Matthew Czesarski
<matthew.czesarski at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear list.
>
> I've got a feeling that what I'm trying to do *should* be easy but at the
> moment I can't find a non-brute-force method.
>
> I'm working with quite a high-rank matrix; 7 dimensions filled with chi**2
> values. It's form is something like this:
>
>     chi2 = numpy.ones((3,4,5,6,7,8,9))
>
> What I need to do is slice out certain 2 dimensional grids that I then want
> to plot for confidence estimation; make a nice graph. This is fine: as easy
> as it gets if the 2 dimensions are known. E.g. for the 2nd and 5th axes, one
> could hardcode something like this:
>
>     subChi2 = chi2[ ia, ib, :, id, ie, :, ig ]
>
> The difficulty is that the user is to state which plane (s)he wants to slice
> out and we can't code the above. The function itself has to convert 2 rank
> numbers into an expression for a slice and I can't currently figure out how
> to do that. There are a huge number of options (well, there are 7*6=42). If
> one could just manually write a colon into a tuple like (2,2,:,2,2,:,2) or
> something even like 2,2,0:len(2ndDim),2,2,0:len(5thDim),2, things would be
> fine. But that doesn't seem to be an option. An alternative would be to set
> up 2 loops and incrementally read out the individual elements of the slice
> to a new numpy.zeros ( ( len(2ndDim), len(5thDim) ) ), but again we seem to
> be diverging from elegance.
>
> There must be something that I'm missing. Could somebody have a pointer as
> to what it is?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Matt
>
>
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>



-- 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hoyt Koepke
UBC Department of Computer Science
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hoytak/
hoytak at gmail.com
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