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up vote 1 down vote favorite

I have a problem reading ASCII file in Python. Here's an example of the file: http://pastebin.com/CTwwPPKA

I tried using numpy's genfromtxt:

data = np.genfromtxt("example.txt")

But this way I cannot read dates and times properly since they should be datetime objects. On the other hand, loadtxt can only read float values, which is also not acceptable.

Could you please suggest me a way to properly read that kind of file?

share|improve this question
up vote 1 down vote accepted

you have to use dtype option here.

x = np.genfromtxt("example.txt", dtype=None)
print(x[0])

and you will get

('DATA', 34967565, '2011-08-04', '19:00:00:081', 0.0272448, -0.17718500000000001, 4.2143899999999999, 524.57600000000002, 17.485499999999998, 101.07599999999999, 0.45927400000000002, 0.19031300000000001, 0.100296, 0.97492599999999996, 1.94354, 100.73399999999999, 12.538600000000001, 10.3786, 44318.5, 39605.5, 39234.5, 40298.0, 68)

The trick here is that you have to specify dtype to None so that numpy can automatically recognize strings and numbers, while the default dtype is float.

Then you can use datetime.strptime to convert the strings to datetime objects accordingly.

share|improve this answer
    
Thanks! That helped. – abudis Sep 21 '11 at 10:22
up vote 2 down vote

You want to use csv.reader() with the csv.excel_tab dialect.

Examples of csv usage

share|improve this answer
    
The problem is that the file has both tab and space delimiters. – abudis Sep 21 '11 at 9:27
1  
Not according to what you pasted. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Sep 21 '11 at 9:29

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