[Numpy-discussion] greedy loadtxt

[Christopher Barker]

lorenzo bolla wrote:
> The problem with fromfile() is that it doesn't know anything about ndarrays.
> If my file is a table of ncols and nrows, fromfile() will give me a 
> 1darray with nrows*ncols elements, while loadtxt() will give me a 
> 2dmatrix nrows x ncols. In other words, I loose the "shape" of the table.

yup -- you need to know something about the shape. It also doesn't 
support comments, and all sorts of other stuff. It is, however, very 
fast. I mostly use it to read more complex file formats, ones that first 
tell you haw many numbers there are, then have the numbers. It works 
great for that.

hmm-- I wonder how hard it would be to special case linefeeds (from 
other white space) in fromfile(), and have it figure out the shape from 
that?

-CHB


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