On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 7:07 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:
> That said, AFAICT what people actually want in most use cases is support for arrays that can hold variable-length strings, and the only place where the current approach is *optimal* is when we need mmap compatibility with legacy formats that use fixed-width-nul-padded fields (at which point it's super convenient). It's not even possible to *represent* all Python strings or bytestrings in current numpy unicode or string arrays (Python strings/bytestrings can have trailing nuls). So if we're talking about tweaks to the current system it probably makes sense to focus on this use case specifically. > > From context I'm assuming FITS files use fixed-width-nul-padding for strings? Is that right? I know HDF5 doesn't. Yes, HDF5 does. Or at least, it is supported in addition to the variable-length ones. https://support.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/doc/Advanced/UsingUnicode/index.html -- Robert Kern
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