subset structured array based on column names

Question

I have a structured array created from a CSV file.

I have many fields/columns. I would like to create a subset array.

z=mydata[['z1','z2','z3']] will do the trick, but sometimes z goes from z1-z2 only or z1-z10.

Is there an easy way to subset all columns where the column name starts with z regardless of how many columns are in the data? Obviously the resultant array will have different number of columns but that's fine.

Answer 1

Not very pretty, but you can do the following:

z = mydata[[x for x in a.dtype.names if 'z' in x]]

Effectively you loop through all of the column names and check if the column name matches the criteria. If there is a better way I would be very interested as I do similar operations in pandas using the pd.DataFrame.columns attribute.