title: Reading unicode elements into numpy array
body: <p>Consider a text file called "new.txt" containing the following elements:</p>
  
  <pre><code>μm
  ∂r
  ∆λ
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In Python 2.7, I can read the file by typing:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import codecs
  &gt;&gt;&gt; f = codecs.open('new.txt', encoding='utf-8')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; lines = [line.strip() for line in f2.readlines()]
  &gt;&gt;&gt; lines
  [u'\u03bcm', u'\u2202r', u'\u2206\u03bb']
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print lines[0]
  μm
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So far so good. I can easily convert this list to a numpy array via:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import numpy as np
  &gt;&gt;&gt; arr = np.array(lines)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; arr
  array([u'\u03bcm', u'\u2202r', u'\u2206\u03bb'], 
        dtype='&lt;U2')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The issue is, I can't read this file directly via numpy's loadtxt function:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; np.loadtxt('new.txt', dtype=np.unicode_)
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
    File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/lib/npyio.py", line 805, in loadtxt
      X = np.array(X, dtype)
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xce in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What is the correct way to read this file into numpy directly?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>