[Numpy-discussion] variable number of columns in loadtxt/genfromtxt

[Andreas Hilboll]

> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 2:31 AM, Andreas Hilboll <lists at hilboll.de> wrote:
>> I commonly have to deal with legacy ASCII files, which don't have a
>> constant number of columns. The standard is 10 values per row, but
>> sometimes, there are less columns. loadtxt doesn't support this, and in
>> genfromtext, the rows which have less than 10 values are excluded from
>> the
>> resulting array.
>>
>> Is there any way around this?
>
> the trick is: what does it mean when there are fewer values in a row?
> There is no way to universally define that.
>
> Anyway, I'd just punt on using a standard ascii file reader, in the
> time it took to write this question, you'd be halfway to writing a
> custom file parser -- it's really easy in Python, at least if you
> don't need absolutely top performance (which loadtext and genfromtext
> doen't give you anyway)

Actually, that's just what I did before writing this question ;) I was
just wondering if there were some solution available which I didn't know
about.

Cheers, Andreas.