On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 5:02 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:

> But a bunch of folks have brought up that while we're messing around with string encoding, let's solve another problem:
>
> * Exchanging unicode text at the binary level with other systems that generally don't use UCS-4.
>
> For THAT -- utf-8 is critical.
>
> But if I understand Julian's proposal -- he wants to create a parameterized text dtype that you can set the encoding on, and then numpy will use the encoding (and python's machinery) to encode / decode when passing to/from python strings.
>
> It seems this would support all our desires:
>
> I'd get a latin-1 encoded type for compact representation of mostly-ascii data.
>
> Thomas would get latin-1 for binary interchange with mostly-ascii data
>
> The HDF-5 folks would get utf-8 for binary interchange (If we can workout the null-padding issue)
>
> Even folks that had weird JAVA or Windows-generated UTF-16 data files could do the binary interchange thing....
>
> I'm now lost as to what the hang-up is.

The proposal is for only latin-1 and UTF-32 to be supported at first, and the eventual support of UTF-8 will be constrained by specification of the width in terms of characters rather than bytes, which conflicts with the use cases of UTF-8 that have been brought forth.

  https://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2017-April/076668.html