Question

The Matlab function fscanf() seems to be very powerful. Is there any equivalent of the same in python (or numpy)?

Specifically I want to read a matrix from file but I don’t want to iterate through each line to read the matrix.
Something of this sort (from matlab for reading a 2D 1000×1000 matrix):

matrix = fscanf(fopen('input.txt'),'%d',[1000,1000]); 

Answer 1

Python has no built-in fscanf function. The closest way to do it is to read the file line by line and use regular expressions.

Numpy (the Matlab-like Python library), however, has a function that allows to read a file and construct an array from is content : numpy.fromfile (or, as suggested in the other answers, numpy.loadtxt may be more suitable in this case).