How to transform array of strings into matrix with python

Question

what would be the pythonic way to transform multiple arrays of strings into a matrix, where each input string gets its position in the new matrix based on a lexicographical order (or is there even a better criterion?).

In the end, I would like to be able to query the final matrix strings based on a normalized, common criterion and also be able to find out from which inputarray each particular string originally came from.

So for example if I iterate over a bunch of arrays like such (pseudocode!):

array1 = {'01abc','aabc','cba','xyz','999','zz','ZZ'}
array2 = {'0c','aabc','cc','xz','aZZ'}
array3+n = {'...','...','...','....

I'd like to transform that it into something like this:

name        0        9        a        c        x        z        Z 
array1      01abc    999      aabc     cba      xyz      zz       ZZ
array2      0c                aabc     cc       xz
array2                        aZZ
array3...

I already tried googling 2 hours to find my way, but I just don't have the right terminology to describe my problem properly enough... any ideas that can point me into the right direction will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You might want to try numpy :

http://wiki.scipy.org/Tentative_NumPy_Tutorial#head-d3f8e5fe9b903f3c3b2a5c0dfceb60d71602cf93