[Numpy-discussion] variable number of columns in loadtxt/genfromtxt

[Chris Barker]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 2:31 AM, Andreas Hilboll <lists@hilboll.de> wrote:
> I commonly have to deal with legacy ASCII files, which don't have a
> constant number of columns. The standard is 10 values per row, but
> sometimes, there are less columns. loadtxt doesn't support this, and in
> genfromtext, the rows which have less than 10 values are excluded from the
> resulting array.
>
> Is there any way around this?

the trick is: what does it mean when there are fewer values in a row?
There is no way to universally define that.

Anyway, I'd just punt on using a standard ascii file reader, in the
time it took to write this question, you'd be halfway to writing a
custom file parser -- it's really easy in Python, at least if you
don't need absolutely top performance (which loadtext and genfromtext
doen't give you anyway)

-Chris



> Thanks for your insight,
> Andreas.
>
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