title: Read date from tab delimited text file
body: <p>I only recently switched to Python so this question probably has a really simple solution but I can't seem to find it. I have a text file in the following format:</p>
  
  <pre><code>08-05-90    0:00:00     1.78    7.1 10
  08-05-90    3:00:00     2.01    7.4 11.1
  08-05-90    6:00:00     1.74    7   10.5
  08-05-90    9:00:00     1.97    7   11.1
  08-05-90    12:00:00    1.78    6.3 11.1
  ....
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What I want to do essentially is just plot the data (e.g. 3rd column) against the time and date. So I am extracting the third column as an Numpy array using</p>
  
  <pre><code>data = np.loadtxt(fl_name,delimiter='\t',usecols=2)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I also  want to extract the date and time as an array so what I tried was (hoping I could later merge date and time somehow):</p>
  
  <pre><code>date = np.genfromtxt(fl_name,delimiter='\t',usecols=0,converters={0: lambda x: datetime.strptime(x.decode('ascii'),"%d-%m-%y")}) 
  time = np.genfromtxt(fl_name,delimiter='\t',usecols=1,converters={1: lambda x: datetime.strptime(x.decode('ascii'),"%H:%M:%S")})
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That gives me</p>
  
  <pre><code>In [166]: date
  Out[166]: 
  array([datetime.datetime(1990, 5, 8, 0, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1990, 5, 8, 0, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1990, 5, 8, 0, 0), ...,
         datetime.datetime(1992, 4, 7, 0, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1992, 4, 7, 0, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1992, 4, 7, 0, 0)], dtype=object)
  
  In [167]: time
  Out[167]: 
  array([datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 0, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 3, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 6, 0), ...,
         datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 0, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 3, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 6, 0)], dtype=object)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Obviously that's not what I want so my question is - how do I get a datetime array with the time and date from my text file like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>array([datetime.datetime(1990, 5, 8, 0, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1990, 5, 8, 3, 0),
         datetime.datetime(1990, 5, 8, 6, 0), 
         ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks for your input!</p>