[Numpy-discussion] Emulate left outer join?

[Pierre GM]

On Feb 9, 2010, at 8:16 PM, John Hunter wrote:
>> I still think these functions are more generic than the rec_ prefix let think, and I'd still prefer a decision being made about what should go in the module before thinking too hard about how to advertise it.
> 
> I would love to see many of these as methods of record/structured
> arrays, so we could say

Won't work w/ structured arrays, but completely doable for recarrays.
Let's define the functions so that they take a structured array as first argument when possible, and add the functions as a methods to np.recarray. That should be fairly transparent, provided we stick to access-as-key instead of access-as-attribute

> and have "totxt", "tocsv". etc... from rec2txt, rec2csv, etc...   I
> think the functionality of mlab.rec_summarize and rec_groupby is very
> useful, but the interface is a bit clunky and could be made easier for
> the common use cases.

Are you going to work on it or should I step in (in a few weeks...).