reading tabular data

[Chris Barker]

Mark Fardal wrote:
> what do people use when they want to read in long tabular files into
> a (NumPy) array?  I have only tried Scientific.IO.readArray and
> read_ascii from Nick Bower's PYDL.  read_ascii is very simple and
> needs some work to be robust, but it was much faster than readArray
> for the example I tried. Is there something else I should know
> about?

You might also want to take a look at TableIO
(http://www.python.org/topics/scicomp/storage.html) and FortranFormat.

> I can imagine the.re are tradeoffs between speed and generality.
> (I.e., do you want to preserve types of the columns, control over
> comment characters, are strings read in as well, etc.)  Usually I would
> prefer speed over generality, as my input files are usually very simple.

Me too, which is why I have been planning for a long time to write a
clone of MATLAB's fscanf. It is very fast and simple. Maybe someday.

-Chris





-- 
Christopher Barker,
Ph.D.                                                           
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