[SciPy-dev] about data sets

[Jarrod Millman]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Johann Cohen-Tanugi
<cohen@slac.stanford.edu> wrote:
> I just had the opportunity to use loadtxt today and looked for the
> docstring with the marathon in mind. And of course it is a non working
> example as the data file that it is supposed to load does not exist....
> I noticed some time ago that David Cournapeau (I think) had started a
> discussion about this at http://scipy.org/scipy/scikits/wiki/DataSets
> .... I agree with him that loadable datasets in R are a big plus of this
> software.
> I guess that in principle I could create a buffer to read back with
> loadtxt in the example, but given the long term goals of this doc
> marathon, I thought that it might be useful to raise this issue right
> away....

I am not entirely sure that the discussion that David started is
applicable in this case.  In the loadtxt example, it is showing how to
use a data io function, so it doesn't make sense to use the kind of
interface that was being proposed in David's discussion.  You may be
more interested in this:
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/browser/trunk/numpy/lib/_datasource.py
That way the data can be hosted on a remote website.

-- 
Jarrod Millman
Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs
10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
phone: 510.643.4014
http://cirl.berkeley.edu/