We study the electronic structure of a variety of single wall carbon nanotubes and report density of states obtained with the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) generalized gradient approximation and hybrid PBE0 approximation of density functional theory using Gaussian orbitals and periodic boundary conditions. PBE gives very good results for metallic tubes but the addition of a portion of exact exchange in the hybrid PBE0 functional worsens the agreement between experiment and theory. On the other hand, the PBE0 hybrid significantly improves the theoretical predictions (compared to PBE) for semiconducting tubes. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.