reading floats from file

[John Hunter]

I have a file of ascii data arranged as a matrix of floats, eg

0.3125 0.9418 1.2843 0.924516 0.92855
0.3125 0.6593 1.2843 0.900514 0.900914
0.1667 0.9757 1.5611 0.893318 0.893699

I want to read this data and process it a line at a time

This works:

fh = open(dataDir + 'freqs_and_amps.dat')
for line in fh.readlines():
    line = re.sub('^[ ]+', '', line)
    x = map(float, re.split('[\r\n\t ]+', line[0:len(line)-1]))


But I suspect there is a better way.  

Suggestions?

Thanks,
John Hunter