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
On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 7:07 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote: 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