Module to read ARFF files, which are the standard data format for WEKA.

ARFF is a text file format which support numerical, string and data values. The format can also represent missing data and sparse data.

See the WEKA website for more details about arff format and available datasets.

# Examples

    >>> from scipy.io import arff
    >>> from cStringIO import StringIO
    >>> content = """
    ... @relation foo
    ... @attribute width  numeric
    ... @attribute height numeric
    ... @attribute color  {red,green,blue,yellow,black}
    ... @data
    ... 5.0,3.25,blue
    ... 4.5,3.75,green
    ... 3.0,4.00,red
    ... """
    >>> f = StringIO(content)
    >>> data, meta = arff.loadarff(f)
    >>> data
    array([(5.0, 3.25, 'blue'), (4.5, 3.75, 'green'), (3.0, 4.0, 'red')],
          dtype=[('width', '<f8'), ('height', '<f8'), ('color', '|S6')])
    >>> meta
    Dataset: foo
            width's type is numeric
            height's type is numeric
            color's type is nominal, range is ('red', 'green', 'blue', 'yellow', 'black')