title: How to read formatted file in Python array
body: <p>I need to read data from a file that's formatted like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  0.00000  62.12404   0.00000
    1.95695  62.12288   0.00000
    3.91389  62.11939   0.00000
    5.87084  62.11357   0.00000
    7.82779  62.10543   0.00000
    9.78474  62.09496   0.00000
   11.74168  62.08218   0.00000
   13.69863  62.06707   0.00000
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(the script that produces the data specifies the format as "%9.5f").The number of lines isn't fixed and I want to have either an 3xN array or 3 arrays of length N at the end. Normally i'd use <code>lines.split</code> but that doesn't really work if the number of spaces between the numbers isn't fixed.</p>