[Numpy-discussion] Add `nrows` to `genfromtxt`

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 2:32 PM, Warren Weckesser <warren.weckesser at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
>> Still, the case of dtype=None, name=None is problematic.   Suppose I want
>> genfromtxt()  to detect the column names from the 1-st row and data types
>> from the 3-rd.  How would you do that?
>>
>>
>
> This may sound like a cop out, but at some point, I stop trying to make
> genfromtxt() handle every possible case, and instead I would write a custom
> header reader to handle this.
>

In the abstract, I would agree with you.  It is often the case that 2-3
lines of clear Python code is better than a terse function call with half a
dozen non-obvious options.  Specifically, I would be against the proposed
slice_rows because it is either equivalent to  genfromtxt(islice(..), ..)
or hard to specify.

On the other hand, skip_rows is different for two reasons:

1. It is not a new option.  It is currently a deprecated alias to
skip_header, so a change is expected - either removal or redefinition.
2. The intended use-case - inferring column names and type information from
a file where data is separated from the column names is hard to code
explicitly.  (Try it!)
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