Question

Without using matplotlib finance module. I like to get the url data into a numpy array.
where I can to column heading to do math. Like:

prices = r.adj_close

From:
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/pylab_examples/finance_work2.html

except I dont want to use the:

fh = finance.fetch_historical_yahoo(ticker, startdate, enddate)
# a numpy record array with fields: date, open, high, low, close, volume, adj_close)

r = mlab.csv2rec(fh); fh.close()
r.sort()

Using manually create the url:

        url = http://ichart.yahoo.com/table.csv?a=2&c=2011&b=30&e=7&d=7&g=d&f=2011&s=msft&ignore=.csv

        f = urllib.urlopen(url)
        fr = f.read()



        hdata = np.asarray(fr, dtype='object')
        prices = hdata.adj_close
        print prices

Answer 1

use numpy.loadtxt() to load csv:

import numpy as np
import pylab as pl
import urllib
url = "http://ichart.yahoo.com/table.csv?a=2&c=2011&b=30&e=7&d=7&g=d&f=2011&s=msft&ignore=.csv"
f = urllib.urlopen(url)
title = f.readline().strip().split(",")
data = np.loadtxt(f, dtype=np.float, delimiter=",", converters={0: pl.datestr2num}))

the first column is date, so use pylab.datestr2num to convert it to number.