Newbie, easier way to grab file into array...sorting descending order

[eve25]

Hi folks,

I am a Python newbie and using it for scientific computation...due to its supposed efficiency I am trying to use Numarray (after trying scipy and seeing how week was the documantation for that)
I didn't manage to find a function grabbing a matrix from a file into a 2d array..except for particulat data file (FITS,netCDF)...would you have any idea on how to do that? (for now i am just reading the file and splitting on spaces to get it into the array but I doubt it is the most powerfull manner... )
Also, I want to sort a 1d float array in descending order./..I have managed to do that on a list that way...

def descendingCmp(a,b):
return - cmp(a,b)
...
li.sort(descendingCmp)

but not on an array...any ideas?

Any help would be grately appreciated! Thanks and Happy New Year!!!!

 

[JustinEzequiel]

see

http://javascript.about.com/library/blsort.htm

 

[eve25]

Hi,

I may be completely stupid but as far as I understand it that's how I have done on list and as I said, sure it works fine with lists but not with arrays...

Thanks!

 

[JustinEzequiel]

> I may be completely stupid...

Nope, I am.
Haven't used numarray myself yet and grabbed the first google hit.

Anyway, taking a quick look at numarray, I see numarray.NumArray whose instances have a sort method.

Although how the sort method works is beyond me right now.

Can you confirm that you are working with instances of numarray.NumArray?