Although the are many information on how to use the genfromtxt (from numpy) there is not a clear demonstration (that I found…) to show how to easily read a text file with columns of data (including strings – it is straightforward to read columns of numbers with loadtxt for example). …
iPython is a great tool to work with Python interactively, imitating a MatLab environment especially when running with matplotlib and numpy [the pylab module, all can be automatically imported by starting pylab like: ipython –pylab]. So you can use it to load data and start playing around with them. Although …
The routine loadtxt from numpy (numpy.loadtxt) can be used to load columns of data from various files. This works great as long as numbers exist and becomes buggy with strings. Suppose we have a file (named ‘test.test’) with these values: 3103725. 1616.93596535 13.656 0 2011-05-23T23:49:35 3139474. 1405.95436047 13.643 0 2011-05-23T23:51:16 …