Good ways to "expand" a numpy ndarray?

Question

Are there good ways to "expand" a numpy ndarray? Say I have an ndarray like this:

[[1 2]
 [3 4]]

And I want each row to contains more elements by filling zeros:

[[1 2 0 0 0]
 [3 4 0 0 0]]

I know there must be some brute-force ways to do so (say construct a bigger array with zeros then copy elements from old smaller arrays), just wondering are there pythonic ways to do so. Tried numpy.reshape but didn't work:

import numpy as np
a = np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4]])
np.reshape(a, (2, 5))

Numpy complains that: ValueError: total size of new array must be unchanged

Answer 1

You can use numpy.pad, as follows:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> a=[[1,2],[3,4]]
>>> np.pad(a, ((0,0),(0,3)), mode='constant', constant_values=0)
array([[1, 2, 0, 0, 0],
       [3, 4, 0, 0, 0]])

Here np.pad says, "Take the array a and add 0 rows above it, 0 rows below it, 0 columns to the left of it, and 3 columns to the right of it. Fill these columns with a constant specified by constant_values".