[SciPy-User] Alternatives to genfromtxt and loadtxt?

[Giorgos Tzampanakis]

I have numeric data in ascii files, each file about 800 MB. Loading such a
file to Octave takes about 30 seconds. On numpy it is so slow that I've
never had the patience to see it through to the end.

A faster way that I have found is to convert the data to hdf5 and then
load them into numpy, however this is an extra step that I would like to
avoid, if possible.

Any suggestions welcome.