How to use the reshape() function in NumPy

Reshaping data

The reshape() function in NumPy is a powerful tool which allows us to restructure an array according to the arguments we specify.

The function takes in an array and a new shape as required arguments. The new shape must exactly contain all the elements from the input array. For example, we could reshape an array with 8 elements to (4, 2), but not (4, 3).

-1 is a special argument which can only be used once as a dimension. The -1 dimension will take on the value necessary to allow the new shape to contain all the elements of the array.

NumPy also has a variety of other shaping functions, such as flatten or transpose.