ASCII IO utilities for tabular data suitable for datarray, pandas, larry, etc. use

Looking to have functionality as flexible and easy-to-use as R's read.table function.

Existing functions

• numpy.lib.npyio.{genfromtxt, ndfromtxt}
• numpy.loadtxt
• pandas.io.parsers.{parseTest, parseCSV, parseExcel}
• tabular.loadSV
• matplotlib.mlab.{csv2rec, rec2csv}

Necessary features

• Inference of space, tab, or other standard delimited formats
• Handle quoted strings (a la csv module)
• Handle column and row names
• Ability to apply conversion function to a column (e.g. convert date strings to datetime objects)
• Handling of missing data (e.g. NA strings from R)