Time for action – manipulating array shapes

We already learned about the reshape function. Another recurring task is flattening of arrays.

1. Ravel: We can accomplish this with the ravel function:

   In: b
   Out:
   array([[[ 0,  1,  2,  3],
           [ 4,  5,  6,  7],
           [ 8,  9, 10, 11]],
          [[12, 13, 14, 15],
           [16, 17, 18, 19],
           [20, 21, 22, 23]]])
   In: b.ravel()
   Out:
   array([ 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10, 11, 12, 13,14, 15, 16,
          17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23])

2. Flatten: The appropriately-named function, flatten , does the same as ravel, but flatten always allocates new memory whereas ravel might return a view of the array.

   In: b.flatten()
   Out:
   array([ 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10, 11, 12, 13,14, 15, 16,
          17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23])

3. Setting the shape with a tuple: Besides the reshape function, we can also set the shape directly with a tuple, which is shown as follows:

   In: b.shape = (6,4)
   In: b
   Out:
   array([[ 0,  1,  2,  3],
          [ 4,  5,  6,  7...