<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 11:53 AM, Robert Kern <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:robert.kern@gmail.com" target="_blank">robert.kern@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div>I don't know of a format off-hand that works with numpy uniform-length strings and Unicode as well. HDF5 (to my recollection) supports arrays of NULL-terminated, uniform-length ASCII like FITS, but only variable-length UTF8 strings.</div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>HDF5 supports two character sets, ASCII and UTF-8. Both come in fixed and variable length versions:</div><div><a href="https://github.com/PyTables/PyTables/issues/499">https://github.com/PyTables/PyTables/issues/499</a><br></div><div><a href="https://support.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/doc/Advanced/UsingUnicode/index.html">https://support.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/doc/Advanced/UsingUnicode/index.html</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>"Fixed length UTF-8" for HDF5 refers to the number of bytes used for storage, not the number of characters.</div></div></div></div>