I want to know how I can pad a 2D numpy array with zeros using python 2.6.6 with numpy version 1.5.0. But these are my limitations. Therefore I cannot use np.pad. For example, I want to pad a with zeros such that its shape matches b. The reason why I want to do this is so I can do:
b-a
such that
>>> a
array([[ 1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.],
       [ 1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.],
       [ 1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.]])
>>> b
array([[ 3.,  3.,  3.,  3.,  3.,  3.],
       [ 3.,  3.,  3.,  3.,  3.,  3.],
       [ 3.,  3.,  3.,  3.,  3.,  3.],
       [ 3.,  3.,  3.,  3.,  3.,  3.]])
>>> c
array([[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0],
       [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0],
       [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0],
       [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]])
The only way I can think of doing this is appending, however this seems pretty ugly. is there a cleaner solution possibly using b.shape?
Edit, Thank you to MSeiferts answer. I had to clean it up a bit, and this is what I got:
def pad(array, reference_shape, offsets):
    """
    array: Array to be padded
    reference_shape: tuple of size of ndarray to create
    offsets: list of offsets (number of elements must be equal to the dimension of the array)
    will throw a ValueError if offsets is too big and the reference_shape cannot handle the offsets
    """
    # Create an array of zeros with the reference shape
    result = np.zeros(reference_shape)
    # Create a list of slices from offset to offset + shape in each dimension
    insertHere = [slice(offsets[dim], offsets[dim] + array.shape[dim]) for dim in range(array.ndim)]
    # Insert the array in the result at the specified offsets
    result[insertHere] = array
    return result