numpy or _numpy or Numeric?

[George Sakkis]

On Jan 24, 2:24 am, auditory <pkyo... at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am a newbie here
>
> I am trying to read "space separated floating point data" from file
>
> I read about csv module by searching this group,
> but I couldn't read space separated values with csv.
> (which may be matter of course..)
>
> I also read about numpy.fromfile(file, sep=' ') which i can use.
> but on my machine(ubuntu linux) numpy is unknown module,
> which I didn't install by myself.
>
> While trying to install numpy accroding to its homepage.
> (http://numpy.scipy.org/numpydoc/numdoc.htm).
> i am quite confused.
>
> it's talking about the Numerical Python,
> and it says to test whether it is installed or not,
> try import Numeric instead of numpy.
>
> I got Nurmeric modules and
> as a matter of fact i got a file named '_numpy.so' in lib directory.
>
> I can import _numpy but _numpy does not have 'fromfile' method
>
> My question is:
> 1. Do i need to install numpy module?
> 2. Then Is it different from Numeric module?
> 3. Then where can i get it?
>
> 4. Or what is general way to read 'space separated values' from file?
>
> Thanks in advance.

If *all* you need is to read a space-separated file with floating point
values, installing numpy (or Numeric or numarray..) is an overkill; you
can do it in one line in pure Python:

matrix = [map(float, line.split()) for line in
open('my_space_separated_file.txt')]

This stores the values as a list of lists, each list corresponding to a
row in the file. Depending on what you plan to do next with these
numbers, this may or may not be the best way to go about it, but since
you only mentioned the file reading part, we can't assume much.

George