[Numpy-discussion] Re: genfromtxt() skips comments

[Pierre GM]

On May 31, 2013 at 23:08:18 , Albert Kottke (albert.kottke at gmail.com) wrote:
I noticed that genfromtxt() did not skip comments if the keyword names is not True. If names is True, then genfromtxt() would take the first line as the names. I am proposing a fix to genfromtxt that skips all of the comments in a file, and potentially using the last comment line for names.
I'm quite surprised, as comments are already skipped in my standard numpy version (1.7.0). For example:
>>> S=StringIO("!blah\n!blah\n!blah\n!A:B:C\n1:2:3\n4:5:6\n")
>>> np.genfromtxt(S, delimiter=":", comments="!", names=("A","B","C"))
Works as expected, even when using the default `names=None`.
Comments are taken care of with the `split_line` function (an instance of `_iotools.LineSplitter`).