I would like to load a big text file (around 1 GB with 3*10^6 rows and 10 - 100 columns) as a 2D np-array containing strings. However, it seems like numpy.loadtxt() only takes floats as default. Is it possible to specify another data type for the entire array? I've tried the following without luck:

loadedData = np.loadtxt(address, dtype=np.str)

I get the following error message:

/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/numpy-1.8.0.dev_20224ea_20121123-py2.7-macosx-10.8-x86_64.egg/numpy/lib/npyio.pyc in loadtxt(fname, dtype, comments, delimiter, converters, skiprows, usecols, unpack, ndmin)
    833             fh.close()
    834
--> 835     X = np.array(X, dtype)
    836     # Multicolumn data are returned with shape (1, N, M), i.e.
    837     # (1, 1, M) for a single row - remove the singleton dimension there

ValueError: cannot set an array element with a sequence

Any ideas? (I don't know the exact number of columns in my file on beforehand.)

python numpy
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