If you have relatively big text file np.loadtxt() is not the best function, using np.genfromtxt is better!

data_2 = np.genfromtxt('http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/iris/iris.data',dtype='str')

pp.pprint(data_2)

array(['5.1,3.5,1.4,0.2,Iris-setosa', '4.9,3.0,1.4,0.2,Iris-setosa',
       '4.7,3.2,1.3,0.2,Iris-setosa', ...,
       '6.5,3.0,5.2,2.0,Iris-virginica', '6.2,3.4,5.4,2.3,Iris-virginica',
       '5.9,3.0,5.1,1.8,Iris-virginica'], 
      dtype='