Question

Are Decimal data type objects (dtypes) available in NumPy?

>>> import decimal, numpy
>>> d = decimal.Decimal('1.1')
>>> s = [['123.123','23'],['2323.212','123123.21312']]
>>> ss = numpy.array(s, dtype=numpy.dtype(decimal.Decimal))
>>> a = numpy.array(s, dtype=float)
>>> type(d)
<class 'decimal.Decimal'>
>>> type(ss[1,1])
<class 'str'>
>>> type(a[1,1])
<class 'numpy.float64'>

I suppose numpy.array doesn’t support every dtype, but I sort of thought that it would at least let a dtype propagate as far as it could as long as the right operations were defined. Am I missing something? Is there some way for this to work?

Answer 1

Important caveat: this is a bad answer

You would probably do best to skip to the next answer.

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It seems that Decimal is available:

>>> import decimal, numpy
>>> d = decimal.Decimal('1.1')
>>> a = numpy.array([d,d,d],dtype=numpy.dtype(decimal.Decimal))
>>> type(a[1])
<class 'decimal.Decimal'>

I’m not sure exactly what you are trying to accomplish. Your example is more complicated than is necessary for simply creating a decimal NumPy array.