numpy.genfromtxt() datatype error

I think I got this figured out. After spending a couple of hours trying to figure out why the TypeError: data type "<insert your data type here>" not understood would occur I tried looking at the Numpy Docs. Apparently, you have to write numpy.dtype before creating your "array protocol string". Your code should looke something likes this:

DATATYPES = numpy.dtype([('myint', 'i'), ('myid', 'i'), ('price', 'f8'), ('name', 'a200'), ('brandId', '<i8'), ('brandName', 'a200'), ('imageUrl', '|S500'), ('description', '|S900'), ('vender', '|S100'), ('pattern', '|S50'), ('material', '|S50'),])

You cannot just leave that part out, even though Dr Kat does exactly that in her video. .

According to the http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.genfromtxt.html

numpy.genfromtxt(fname, dtype=<type 'float'>, comments='#', delimiter=None, skiprows=0, skip_header=0, skip_footer=0, converters=None, missing='', missing_values=None, filling_values=None, usecols=None, names=None, excludelist=None, deletechars=None, replace_space='_', autostrip=False, case_sensitive=True, defaultfmt='f%i', unpack=None, usemask=False, loose=True, invalid_raise=True)[source]

Load data from a text file, with missing values handled as specified.

Each line past the first skip_header lines is split at the delimiter character, and characters following the comments character are discarded.

Parameters:

• fname : file or str -- File, filename, or generator to read. If the filename extension is gz or bz2, the file is first decompressed. Note that generators must return byte strings in Python 3k.
• dtype : dtype, optional -- Data type of the resulting array. If None, the dtypes will be determined by the contents of each column, individually.
• ...

By setting to None, the type is derived from the column contents, which apparently works.

In the video Loading Raw Data at 9:23, Dr Kat pastes in a DATATYPES list of tuples where each tuple contains a 'heading' and a 'type'. The first one listed is ('myint', 'i'). In her code, dtype=DATATYPES.