truncating null bytes in 'S' breaks decoding that needs them
a = np.array([si.encode('utf-16LE') for si in ['Õsc', 'zxc']], dtype='S') a array([b'\xd5\x00s\x00c', b'z\x00x\x00c'], dtype='|S6')
[ai.decode('utf-16LE') for ai in a] Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#118>", line 1, in <module> [ai.decode('utf-16LE') for ai in a] File "<pyshell#118>", line 1, in <listcomp> [ai.decode('utf-16LE') for ai in a] File "C:\Programs\Python33\lib\encodings\utf_16_le.py", line 16, in decode return codecs.utf_16_le_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf16' codec can't decode byte 0x63 in position 4: truncated data
messy workaround (arrays in contrast to scalars are not truncated in `tostring`)
[a[i:i+1].tostring().decode('utf-16LE') for i in range(len(a))] ['Õsc', 'zxc']
Found while playing with examples in the other thread. Josef