reading tabular data

[Mark Fardal]

Hi,

<NEWBIE ALERT>

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?  I can imagine there 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.

thanks,
Mark Fardal
University of Victoria