NumPy Essentials

Memory layout of ndarray

A particularly interesting attribute of the ndarray object is flags. Type the following code:

In [12]: x.flags 

It should produce something like this:

Out[12]: 
  C_CONTIGUOUS : True 
  F_CONTIGUOUS : False 
  OWNDATA : True 
  WRITEABLE : True 
  ALIGNED : True 
  UPDATEIFCOPY : False 

The flags attribute holds information about the memory layout of the array. The C_CONTIGUOUS field in the output indicates whether the array was a C-style array. This means that the indexing of this array is done like a C array. This is also called row-major indexing in the case of 2D arrays. This means that, when moving through the array, the row index is incremented first, and then the column index is incremented. In the case of a multidimensional C-style ...