Pierre GM wrote: > On Oct 6, 2009, at 10:08 PM, Bruce Southey wrote: >> option to merge delimiters - actually in SAS it is default
Wow! that sure strikes me as a bad choice. > Ahah! I get it. Well, I remember that we discussed something like that a > few months ago when I started working on np.genfromtxt, and the > default of *not* merging whitespaces was requested. I gonna check > whether we can't put this option somewhere now... I'd think you might want to have two options: either "whitespace" which would be any type or amount of whitespace, or a specific delimeter: say "\t" or " " or " " (two spaces), etc. In that case, it would mean "one and only one of these". Of course, this would fail in Bruce's example: >>>> A B C D >>>> 1 2 3 4 >>>> 1 4 5 as there is a space for the delimeter, and one for the data! This looks like fixed-format to me. if it were single-space delimited, it would look more like: when the delimiter is whitespace. A B C D E 1 2 3 4 5 1 4 5 which is the same as: A, B, C, D, E 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 1, , , 4, 5 If something like SAS actually does merge decimeters, which I interpret to mean that if there are a few empty fields and you call for tab-delimited , you only get one tab, then information as simply been lost -- there is no way to recover it! -Chris -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception chris.bar...@noaa.gov _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
