Thanks for your questions. Here come some answer below. On Dec 2, 2:50 pm, Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED] cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:41:29 -0800,bkamraniwrote: > > Hi Python gurus! > > I'm going to read in an Ascii file containing float numbers in rows and > > columns (say 10 columns 500000 rows) for further numerical process. > > Which format is best to save them in, eg, dictionary, list, or numpy > > array when it comes to performance? > > That depends on: > > (1) What do you mean by performance? Speed or memory use?
Well, I think the speed is more important in this case as the volume of data is not large. > (2) Do you care about the performance of reading the data in, or the > performance of working with the data later, or both? The reading process is pretty fast and in range of some second, but I meant the performance of working with data. > (3) What do you intend to do with the numbers later? Normal numercal calcualtion such as sum, multiplication. (but not matrix multiplication) Thanks /Ben > > Will it be beneficial to convert all strings to float directly after > > reading or it doesn't matter to save them as string and thereafter when > > it comes to calculation convert them to floats? > > That depends on what you intend to do with them. Since you're doing > numerical processing, it's probably a good idea to convert them to > numbers rather than strings. > > -- > Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
