[SciPy-dev] about data sets

[Robert Kern]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 7:18 PM, Jarrod Millman <millman@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 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.

doctestable examples accessing the internet gives me heebie-jeebies.

Frankly, I'd prefer that one just use a StringIO and keep the data small.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
 -- Umberto Eco