On Apr 26, 2017 9:30 AM, "Chris Barker - NOAA Federal" <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:

UTF-8 does not match the character-oriented Python text model. Plenty
of people argue that that isn't the "correct" model for Unicode text
-- maybe so, but it is the model python 3 has chosen. I wrote a much
longer rant about that earlier.

So I think the easy to access, and particularly defaults, numpy string
dtypes should match it.

This seems a little vague? The "character-oriented Python text model" is just that str supports O(1) indexing of characters. But... Numpy doesn't. If you want to access individual characters inside a string inside an array, you have to pull out the scalar first, at which point the data is copied and boxed into a Python object anyway, using whatever representation the interpreter prefers. So AFAICT it makes literally no difference to the user whether numpy's internal representation allows for fast character access.

-n