title: reading scientific notation csv file with numpy
body: <p>I'm trying to load a file that represents a 2D matrix with numpy loadtxt</p>
  
  <pre><code>cov = np.loadtxt("cov.csv")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The first element is in scientific notation which causes a failure</p>
  
  <pre><code>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
  &lt;ipython-input-80-0796abd8c0f7&gt; in &lt;module&gt;()
  ----&gt; 1 cov = np.loadtxt("cov.csv")
  
  C:\home\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\numpy\lib\npyio.py in loadtxt(fname, dtype, comments, delimiter, converters, skiprows, usecols, unpack, ndmin)
      858 
      859             # Convert each value according to its column and store
  --&gt; 860             items = [conv(val) for (conv, val) in zip(converters, vals)]
      861             # Then pack it according to the dtype's nesting
      862             items = pack_items(items, packing)
  
  C:\home\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\numpy\lib\npyio.py in &lt;listcomp&gt;(.0)
      858 
      859             # Convert each value according to its column and store
  --&gt; 860             items = [conv(val) for (conv, val) in zip(converters, vals)]
      861             # Then pack it according to the dtype's nesting
      862             items = pack_items(items, packing)
  
  ValueError: could not convert string to float: b'5.0e-7,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I couldn't find any documentation on how to make this work. </p>
  
  <pre><code>numpy version: 1.9.2 
  python version: 3.4.3 |Anaconda 2.3.0 (32-bit)| (default, Mar  6 2015, 12:08:17) [MSC v.1600 32 bit (Intel)]
  </code></pre>