Question

I am sorry if this is a silly question but I have been working on this for hours and I cannot make it work. Please help!

I have a .txt file that originated from Excel. The file contains strings and numbers but I am only interested in the numbers, which is why I skip the first line and I only read from column 2 on.

   from numpy import *

I load it into Python doing

    infile = open('europenewMatrix.txt','r')
    infile.readline() # skip the first line
    numbers = [line.split(',')[2:] for line in infile.readlines()]
    infile.close()

because I need to do computations with this, I convert it into a matrix:

    travelMat = array(numbers)

ok, but this didn’t convert the strings into integers, so I manually do it:

    for i in xrange(len(numbers)):
        for j in xrange(len(numbers)):
            travelMat[i,j] = int(self.travelMat[i,j])
        #end for

At this point, I was hoping that all my entries would be integers
but if I do

    print 'type is',type(self.travelMat[1,2]) 

the answer is:

type is <type 'numpy.string_'>

how can I really convert all my entries into integers?
thanks a lot!

Answer 1

convert the numbers as you read them, before creating the array:

infile = open('europenewMatrix.txt','r')
infile.readline() # skip the first line
numbers = []
for line in infile:
    numbers.append([int(val) for val in line.split(',')[2:]])
infile.close()
travelMat = array(numbers)