[Numpy-discussion] Indexing changes/deprecations

[Jaime Fernández del Río]

On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 5:27 AM, Sebastian Berg
<sebastian at sipsolutions.net>wrote:

>
> And most importantly, is there any behaviour thing in the index
> machinery that is bugging you, which I may have forgotten until now?
>

I find this behavior of boolean indexing a little bit annoying:

>>> a = np.arange(12).reshape(3, 4)
>>> a
array([[ 0,  1,  2,  3],
       [ 4,  5,  6,  7],
       [ 8,  9, 10, 11]])
>>> row_idx = np.array([True, True, False])
>>> col_idx = np.array([False, True, True, False])

This shouldn't work, but it does, because there are the same number of
Trues in both indexing arrays. Do we really want this to happen?:
>>> a[row_idx, col_idx]
array([1, 6])

This shouldn't work, and it doesn't:
>>> col_idx = np.array([False, True, True, True])
>>> a[row_idx, col_idx]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: shape mismatch: objects cannot be broadcast to a single shape


It would be nice if something like this worked, or at least it should raise
a different error, because those arrays **can** be broadcast to a single
shape:
>>> a[row_idx[:, np.newaxis], col_idx]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: shape mismatch: objects cannot be broadcast to a single shape

For this there is the following workaround, although it does creation of a
fully expanded boolean indexing array, which I was hoping the previous
non-working code would avoid:
>>> a[row_idx[:, np.newaxis] & col_idx]
array([1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7])

Jaime
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