title: How to use numpy.genfromtxt when first column is string and the remaining columns are numbers?
body: <p>Basically, I have a bunch of data where the first column is a string (label) and the remaining columns are numeric values. I run the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>data = numpy.genfromtxt('data.txt', delimiter = ',')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This reads most of the data well, but the label column just gets 'nan'.  How can I deal with this?</p>