Python in a Nutshell

Name

shape

Synopsis

The a .shape attribute is a tuple with one item per axis of a, giving the length of that axis. You can assign a sequence of integers to a .shape to change the shape of a, but a’s size (the total number of elements) must remain the same. When you assign to a .shape another sequence s, one of s’s items can be -1, meaning that the length along that axis is whatever is needed to keep a’s size unchanged. However, the product of the other items of s must evenly divide a’s size, or else the reshaping raises an exception. When you need to change the total number of elements in a, call function resize (covered in Section 15.6.9 later in this chapter).